


but i've learned how to earn my keep (how to clean my kill)

by chemicalpixie



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Abusive Parents, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking, F/F, Mentions of Forced Prostitution, Psychological Trauma, Torture, anger issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-08-22 10:18:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16595966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemicalpixie/pseuds/chemicalpixie
Summary: “and in the arena that was easy, it was kill or be killed, but what they never told her is that the hard part is after the games when you’ve ripped out a boy’s throat with your teeth and everyone around you sees you as a monster or a spectacle.”or; enobaria was born and bred for the games, but that doesn't make them any easier.





	but i've learned how to earn my keep (how to clean my kill)

**Author's Note:**

> uhhh this is literally like 22.5k what the hell. i have a lot of feelings about enobaria and they all went into this fic and now it's 22.5k. what the fuck. i need to go lie down  
> i was gonna write two more scenes but my inspo has NOT been here for it so i might write them and edit this later but i wouldn't count on it lmao sorry. also kudos to @lorata for writing lyme and brutus better than i ever could; their relationship in this fic (well, the little you see of it) is mostly based off of their characterization of the two of them. go check out their work when you've got free time, it's fantastic.
> 
> the title is from “children's work” by dessa and it doesn't super fit eno lyrics-wise but dessa's music has big enobaria vibes like, sound wise, so. you know. please kudos and comment if you liked it, it'd make my day!

enobaria meets her mentor on the day she volunteers, on the train to the capitol. she’s older, with dark hair and dark eyes, and she’s drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. 

“what are you doing?” enobaria half-asks, half-demands, because even the academy never managed to beat the curious streak out of her. 

the woman looks up at her and smiles, but it’s weary. there are lines in her face that enobaria can see, and she tries not to flinch. aging scares her. “enobaria, i presume?” she says, and enobaria nods. the woman takes another swig of whiskey and then adds, “chances are you’ll die. i’m preparing myself for that.”

“i’m not going to die!” enobaria exclaims, indignant. “i’m a district two!”

the woman’s smile returns. “ah, but so is magmus, and tiberius is his mentor, and, i must say, tiberius has a pretty stellar track record. and so were mason and vesta, but that didn’t stop them from dying after that little bitch fawn from ten took a hammer to their skull.”

enobaria snarls. “fine,” she says. she vividly remembers watching mason and vesta die at the academy, the trainers asking them exactly what mistakes mason and vesta had made so they would know to avoid them. and as far as she’s concerned, magmus doesn’t hold a candle to her. “don’t help me. i’ll win.”

the woman bursts out laughing, and enobaria jumps, and her hands are at her sides where if she was still in the academy her throwing knives would be. “that’s my girl,” she says, approvingly, and then looks at enobaria, her hands at her sides. “good instincts,” she says, and smiles. “those’ll get you far.”

“who are you, even,” enobaria says, and it’s half a question, half flippant, flopping back in her chair in a huff. the woman clicks her tongue. 

“i’m agrippa, darling,” she says, and suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle fill in in enobaria’s mind. agrippa, the victor who won the games the year the capitol provided no weapons in the arena by beating her opponents’ heads in with a rock. 

“oh,” enobaria says. “sorry.” the sorry isn’t genuine, not really, but enobaria is good at faking it. not good in a she can put on a persona for caesar kind of way but more in a she’s started too many fights in her life for her to be bad at apologizing kind of way. 

agrippa laughs again. “don’t be sorry,” she says. “it’s why i picked you.”

“you...picked me?” enobaria asks, brow furrowed in confusion. 

agrippa nods, taking another sip of whiskey before she says, “the mentors get to choose who the volunteer will be from the pool of eligible candidates, as long as they can justify their choice to the committee. and i picked you.”

“why?” enobaria asks, because she isn’t the best at combat in the academy, or acting, or anything, really. she’s good, she knows that, but she isn’t the _best_.

agrippa sighs, settling back into her chair. “because you’re angry. because that means you’ll fight better in a real arena than anyone who’s good at combat just because they know the motions. if you’re angry, it keeps you alive.”

//

the prep team wastes no time in getting her ready for the parade. she wears a gladiator's outfit, and her district partner is dressed similarly. the parade passes quickly, and soon she's back in the apartment, where agrippa and tiberius are waiting for the two of them. 

the reaping ceremonies are on tv, and enobaria grins, a half-smile on her face, looking at agrippa. “any competition?”

agrippa shoots her a glare. “luster and glory from district one and mags and calder from district four have asked for an alliance. we accepted, of course.” enobaria says nothing. agrippa says nothing in return. enobaria can do this for as long as needed. she’s used to getting her way in the academy, and she’s got no intention of not getting her way now. 

“go to bed,” agrippa says finally. “training’s in the morning. you can scope out the other tributes then, since you won’t take this seriously.”

“i am taking this seriously!” enobaria yells, stalking to her room and slamming the door. in retrospect, she realizes that slamming the door might not have helped her point. 

//

she wakes the next morning to agrippa dumping ice cold water on her head. “jesus!” enobaria shouts. “what was that for?”

“up and at em,” she says with a smirk.

“you’re a _bitch_ ,” enobaria snarls, and agrippa nods slowly. she doesn’t seem to give a single shit what enobaria thinks of her.

“if you don’t get to breakfast, magmus is gonna eat all the good food, and you’re gonna be left with porridge and a bruised apple,” agrippa warns. “and don’t think i’ll make any effort in getting you something else to eat,” she adds, before leaving enobaria alone. enobaria pulls herself out of bed and heads to the shower, taking a quick cold shower before heading out to breakfast. tiberius, agrippa, and magmus are all already seated.

“decided to join us, i see,” agrippa says half-thoughtfully, and magmus snickers. enobaria takes a seat next to him and stabs her fork into the table where his hand had been a second before. magmus just smirks at her, and agrippa and tiberius ignore it. enobaria eats her egg and none of them say anything else.

//

after the lady at the training center has given her whole “don’t fight with other tributes you’ll have time for that in the arena” speech bullshit, enobaria heads for the gauntlet. sure, she should find some time for survival, but as any good little two tribute knows, training is as much for learning survival skills as it is for intimidating the other tributes. 

enobaria’s about a minute off the gauntlet, catching her breath (sure, they’ve run drills like the gauntlet, but the capital never lets the districts copy their own equipment for training, and whatever kind of equipment they have back at the academy must be toned down, she guesses) when she hears feet pounding behind her, and she barely has time to look around before a girl with chocolate brown hair slams into her on her way off the gauntlet. enobaria staggers, barely managing to stay on her feet. when she turns to look, the other girl is still standing, and she gives enobaria a threatening smirk.

“whoops,” she says. “didn’t see you there.”

“bull _shit_ ,” enobaria hisses. it’s more of a whisper than anything else because she knows agrippa will give her hell if she gets into a fight on day one of training, and she doesn’t even have time to process exactly what she’s thinking, or she’d spend a hell of a lot more time thinking about how she already cares what agrippa thinks because two days ago she’d already be on this little bitch because who does she think she is, anyway? 

the girl shrugs. “be like that,” she says, and enobaria shoots her a glare. the girl glares right back. they’re both sizing each other up. after a few seconds, the girl puts out her hand for enobaria to shake. “ruby,” she says. “district one.”

enobaria doesn’t shake her hand. “enobaria. two,” she says in reply, and walks over to the throwing knives. 

//

“good news!” agrippa begins as she walks in to dinner. enobaria is halfway through a bowl of some kind of fancy goat stew as she does so, and she almost drops her spoon in shock. “glory’s girl doesn’t want to join the pack if you’re in it.”

it takes enobaria a second to process that. “that’s not good news,” she says finally, annoyed. 

“you’re damn right it’s not,” agrippa says. “didn’t i tell you to play nice with the other kids, ‘baria?” enobaria chaffs at the nickname but lets it slide because right now she’s got other things she’d rather argue with her mentor on. 

“actually, no,” she points out. “you didn’t.”

agrippa huffs at this. “well, that was because i thought i didn’t _need_ to.”

“is ruby out of the pack, then?” enobaria asks, trying not to seem eager, even though she is, because she’s only talked to the girl for about a minute and she already hates her guts.

“nah,” agrippa says, after drowning a gulp of whiskey. “glory isn’t gonna let her get out of the pack. just be careful. she’s gonna have it out for you.”

enobaria goes back to her soup. “so, nothing new, then?” she asks, expecting another glare or reprimand. she’s pleasantly surprised when agrippa chuckles and grins at her. 

“now you’re getting it.”

//

they put enobaria in a red long-sleeved dress for her interview with caesar flickerman. the dress has a sequined design accentuating her waist, and a slit up her thigh. they pair it with a pair of sturdy black heels and paint her nails black to match. the dress’s long sleeves, she knows, are to hide her muscular arms. girls should be delicate, here in the capital. never mind the fact that every year they spent money betting which girl will kill the most people. she pushes that thought aside. if they’re going to bet money on anyone, she’s here to make sure they bet on her.

“welcome, enobaria mcclave of district two!” caesar says, as cashmere enters. his hair is a bright red, and he smiles widely as enobaria enters. 

“well, well, well!” he says. “looks like we match!” he laughs and gestures to her dress.

enobaria gives him a tight-lipped smile. “it seems like we do,” she says. 

“so, enobaria,” he says. “can you tell us what your weapon of choice is?”

“i like to think i’m good with throwing knives,” she says. agrippa had told her to appear modest, but confident. cockiness turns off sponsors. too often, she’d said, those who are cocky are stupid. and the sponsors want to know they can bet on someone who will win. “sponsors are looking for investments,” she’d said. “they want a tribute who can put their money where their mouth is.” enobaria had resisted the urge to comment that she could put her mouth in more places than that, but only because district two’s escort, cordelia solis, a woman enobaria hates more than anyone else, and not just because of her ridiculously low widow’s peak and deep brown hair and dyed-gold eyebrows and golden lipstick, was in the room, and enobaria wasn’t in the mood to listen to her bitch about how all the quarry kids were uncivilized. just because her parents enrolled her in the academy because they wanted the food and water that came with enrollment doesn’t mean she didn’t earn her right to be here.

caesar raises an eyebrow. “like to think?” he asks. 

“well. i didn’t want to seem too cocky,” she admits, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder in a practiced motion. “but i am quite good.”

“oh, i understand,” caesar says, with a bit of a laugh. “can you keep a secret?” he asks, and she nods. he leans over and whispers into her ear, “i think modesty is quite overrated.”

she smiles politely. the crowd cheers, begging enobaria to share what caesar said, despite the fact that he wasn’t that quiet to begin with, and he has a mike on, so surely they’ve heard it. “now, now,” she says. “it’s a secret for a reason.”

caesar smiles indulgently at her. “she’s right, you know!” he mock-pouts, but even his fake-distress doesn’t last longer than a second before he’s sitting up again, bright-eyed. “i think we can expect a lot from you in the arena,” he says, and enobaria smiles, a real smile this time. 

“i think so too, caesar,” she says. “and if you have me back again, i’m afraid i might have to spill that secret of yours.” she’s bored by this routine, but it pulls in sponsors, so she’ll go with it. 

caesar’s face twists into an exaggerated frown. “oh, no,” he says, looking around at the crowd. it’s only a second before he’s got the over-exaggerated grin on his face again, and he’s standing, pulling enobaria to her feet. “let’s wish the best of luck to enobaria!” he yells, and the crowd cheers. caesar raises her arm in the air and, with the crowd cheering her name, enobaria feels almost like she’s already won. 

//

the next morning they leave for the arena. enobaria sleeps fitfully, dreaming about ruby and meeting her in the arena. the arenas change, constantly leaving enobaria to struggle to try to catch up with ruby, who just smiles like she knows a secret and keeps chasing enobaria. the arena they start in is one enobaria saw in the academy and she can’t remember the name of the victor, not in her half-dreaming state, but she keeps catching glimpses of white-blonde hair in the trees she thinks is hers, a mossy forest filled with trees taller than anything enobaria’s ever seen, and ruby is chasing her through the forest like a ghost in red. then the landscape twists and turns into a mountainous arena, the one from last year with the razor-sharp thorny trees. enobaria struggles to keep her balance on a slanting hillside, just as ruby chases her down into a valley, towards a flock of the candy-pink birds with golden beaks and claws that she remembers seeing in videos of the second quarter quell. just as ruby backs her into the flock, the arena shifts again, changing into the lava rock landscape of agrippa’s games, and enobaria stumbles back, a lava rock tripping her, so she lands flat on her back, and just as ruby lands on top of her, a knife clutched so tightly in her hand that her knuckles are white, enobaria shoots up in bed, awake. 

her alarm is just about to go off. she turns it off herself, and takes a cold shower. she gets up and gets dressed in a plain black shirt and pants. they’ll make her change soon anyway. she braids her hair into two tight braids that start at her forehead and end at the nape of her neck. as they wait for the hover plane comes to get her and magmus, enobaria stands next to agrippa and digs her nails into her palm to pretend that she isn’t nervous.

//

as they’re raised up into the arena, all enobaria can see is white. everything around her is so white that it’s almost blinding. it takes her a minute to adjust, but then she realizes that the entire arena is snowy. that explains the bulk of the jacket. probably just so most of the tributes don’t freeze to death. because that wouldn’t make for a good show. 

enobaria can see the cornucopia. it’s right in front of her, a bright golden splotch in the world of white. she thinks she can see trees in the distance, so there’s firewood, too. that’s good. nobody will freeze, even if the supplies get destroyed. she can already feel the chilly wind stinging her face. 

when the gong goes off, many of the tributes are still too blinded to move. enobaria is lucky that she isn’t. she races for the cornucopia, digging through the packs until she finds a pair of darkened goggles. she slips them on and suddenly she can see so much better, and the other tributes are starting to get their bearings, and enobaria realizes exactly how quiet it is, suddenly, and she spins around, and ruby’s behind her, with a sword in her hands. she tosses enobaria a matched set of throwing knives with a grin. 

“thought you hated me,” enobaria says, tone rising in confusion. she’s not confused, not really. she knows ruby knows that she can’t take out the entirety of the slaughterhouse districts by herself, so it only makes sense to arm enobaria. but the cameras don’t know that and the rivalry will keep things interesting. 

ruby shoots her a look. “someone’s gotta keep you alive so i can kill you myself later,” she singsongs, pulling her sword across the girl from district nine’s stomach. enobaria stifles a grimace at the ugly reddish-brown color of the guts spilling out into the snow. it’s not that enobaria’s sensitive to gore. she’s a career, so that’d just be fucking stupid, but it’s more that ruby is acting against the unspoken code of the careers — you make the bloodbath kills quick and fast, you kill the babies early, so they don’t have to suffer, you save the ugly kills for later when things are getting slow — but it’s too early to start arguing with the pack so she turns away and throws a knife into the girl from eight’s skull. she’s thirteen, scared and quivering and shivering. enobaria makes it quick. 

all in all, when the bloodbath is over, there’s fourteen tributes left standing, with six of them in the pack. enobaria cleans the blood off her knives and thinks that those numbers aren’t too bad. 

//

the temperature drops at night, so instead of hunting, they sit around the fire, huddled into the others for warmth. ruby’s district partner is a boy named mink, with soft-looking brown hair. the two district fours are a boy and a girl named rayn and coral, who are seventeen and eighteen, respectively, and they both sit away from the other careers. coral has beautiful strawberry-blonde hair, and they sit together and eye the rest of the pack nervously. _of course_ , enobaria thinks. _they thought because they’d gutted fish they knew how to kill humans. it isn’t nearly that easy_. she snorts to herself and watches ruby flirt with magmus across the campfire. it isn’t genuine, of course, nothing ruby does ever is, and there’s a dead light in her eyes that makes enobaria wary. she watches them and imagines the color of ruby’s guts spilled out in the snow and tries not to laugh.

//

they hunt the next day, and as they do, enobaria flexes her fingers in her gloves (that they’d found in the cornucopia) to keep them from getting stiff. they’re not far into the hunt; they’ve just barely made it out of the cornucopia clearing and into the forest when she’s shaken from her thoughts by a voice. it’s coral, who looks over her shoulder as she hisses, “there’s something following us.”

“what?” ruby says, spinning around to look at coral, a snarl buried in her throat. “no one is hunting us, coral,” she scoffs. “there’s nobody here that stupid.”

enobaria turns around, and within the trees behind coral, she can see a flash of silvery-brown. “i didn’t say someone,” coral points out, tone irritated. “i said - ” coral never finishes her sentence. the thing from the trees leaps, and it pushes her to the ground. there’s red stripes cut through her tribute uniform where the creature’s claws have torn it. she scrambles up and tries to run, but it grabs her foot with its mouth, and enobaria can hear something crack. coral wails, as the creature pulls her back before putting its two front paws on her shoulders. enobaria stares as the creature tears into her throat with its teeth. it looks up at the rest of them, blood smeared all over its fur, and its tufted ears twitch towards rayn, who is whimpering quietly. there’s a ripple of the creature’s bulging muscles and then it leaps towards rayn, and somehow that’s what it takes to get enobaria into action. she’s reaches for her knives and she throws one at the creature’s shoulder in hopes that it will do anything, but the knife just embeds itself smoothly into the creature, and it doesn’t flinch. the creature lands on rayn, clamping its teeth around his neck, and then another spray of blood erupts and a cannon booms. enobaria looks at the bloody mess that was coral and notices that it has stopped twitching. rayn is still gasping for air, with a horrific whistling noise that shrieks shrilly every time he tries to breathe. if enobaria wasn’t so preoccupied with whatever this mutt is that the gamemakers have sent then she’d throw a knife into his skull to put him out of his misery. _kill the rest of the pack quickly_ , she thinks, repeating the mantra they were taught at the academy to herself. _unless it’s revenge; then it can be ugly, but don’t make it too drawn out or they’ll forget they were ever rooting for you in the first place_.

the creature drops rayn’s body. it crumples to the ground and the cannon booms. that’s when it hits enobaria. they need to run. since her knife didn’t do anything, and this creature is bigger and stronger than them, what all of that means is they can’t kill it. she pivots and begins running. she can hear mink and ruby and magmus’s footsteps pounding on the snow behind her. 

and then. she hears a thud, as mink trips on something. maybe he stepped wrong. maybe he tripped over a root. it doesn’t matter, in the end, though, because he hits the ground and the creature lunges on top of him and enobaria only looks back long enough to see the smear of blood across the white snow. she keeps running as the boom of the cannon echos in her ears. 

not long after, there’s a sickening crunch as the mutt grabs magmus’s leg and it tosses him against what must be a tree. enobaria hears something snap. she looks back long enough to see that he’s not breathing, and she glimpses ruby’s face, painted over with a mask of fear. there’s a cannon boom, and enobaria doesn’t know what to do other than to keep running.

but then they can’t run anymore. they reach the bottom of the valley, and upwards there’s only craggy-looking rock cliff that doesn’t look like it will hold her. ruby almost runs into enobaria as she skids to a stop. 

“go!” she hisses at enobaria, and enobaria shakes her head wordlessly. she knows enough about rocks that she knows this won’t hold her. she watched the neighbor boy's son climb a quarry wall on a dare when she was six and watched him get crushed by rocks when he fell. she can't move. this won't hold her. enobaria knows this. she can hear the creature’s thumping footsteps as it runs down the hill towards them, and ruby’s eyes bulge with fear. she shoves enobaria out of the way, and begins to climb. she’s made it halfway up the cliff when the rock crumbles under her weight and she crashes to the ground beside enobaria. her head is twisted on her neck oddly and there’s a cannon boom. the creature keeps coming, and it takes enobaria a moment to realize what she has to do. she pulls a knife from her pack and pulls it across ruby’s throat and smears her face and neck with it before lying down beside ruby. 

she hears the creature’s thudding footsteps catch up to her only moments later, and can feel its warm breath as it sniffs at her body, and she tries not to move.

//

it's dark by the time she works up the courage to move again. she scrambles up the hill, rushing as quickly and as quietly as she can back to the campsite. the fire they'd left had long since burnt out, but enobaria digs around in the cornucopia and finds matches, and lights the fire again. she snuggles down in the sleeping bag that's closest to the fire and tries not to think about the way coral screamed when the mutt ripped her throat out. 

//

she awakes when dawn breaks, the light shining on her face. it's all too quiet in this arena. it puts her on edge. in her wilderness tests, in her kill tests, there were always birds, or insects, or the wind, or something, but here? here there's no sound, and enobaria shivers. she eats a can of peaches and half a pack of beef jerky before trying to decide what supplies she should take with her. with no one to guard the camp, any time she leaves, it's vulnerable. it was vulnerable yesterday, too, she realizes suddenly, and resists the urge to vomit up her breakfast. she hopes that no one has poisoned her food supply and sorts out tiny backpacks to hide around the clearing. at least now if someone raids it, they won't get everything, enobaria rationalizes. she puts some fruit and some beef jerky and a water bottle into her pack and grabs her knives. she might be the only career left standing, but there's only one thing for a career to do in the hunger games — hunt.

//

the sun is setting in the arena by the time she finds the first tribute, but that doesn’t mean anything. days in the arena might not be as long as they are outside. nights might be longer. there might never be night. she’s tracked down the girl from district eleven. she’s burning a fire, huddled around it. she’s bulky in a way that girls from district eleven usually aren’t. enobaria shrugs it off. probably something to do with the farming. or something. not that it matters. still, enobaria remembers her smashing a kid’s head in with a rock at the cornucopia. frankly, she’s good enough of a fighter that enobaria can’t bear to throw a knife in her head and get it over with. and sure, she mocks ruby for her lack of career honor, but enobaria can’t bear to let this girl go down without a fight. 

she approaches slowly, walking carefully to minimize the crunch of her boots on the snow. “hello,” she says. 

the girl looks up at her, jaded. there’s a dull light in her eyes. “come to kill me?” she asks. she’s sitting on a log in front of the fire.

enobaria shrugs. “not if you kill me first,” she says. the girl scoffs. 

“please,” she says. “i know your little career buddies are hiding behind those trees, just waiting to kill me. you don’t have to pretend.” she stands up, putting her hands on her knees and pushing herself up slowly. enobaria can see her fingers, and they don’t look quite right - they’re blackened on the ends, and far too rigid, but the girl notices her staring. “what?” she says, a deep, underlying anger in her tone. “you gonna kill me, or what?”

“not until you put up a fight,” enobaria says, and she can hear a hint of petulance in her own voice. “you’re too good to go down kneeling. career honor and all that.” she realizes, then, that she’s not sure why this girl wasn’t in the pack. she certainly was strong enough and smart enough. though, she guesses, not being in the pack is what’s kept this girl alive, so maybe she’d made the right choice.

the girl laughs again, but this time it’s a full, throaty laugh. “is that how it is?” she gasps out. “career honor? you kill kids and you think that’s honor?” she stops laughing suddenly. 

“i don’t see you without blood on your hands,” enobaria points out. her knuckles are turning white around the handle of her knife. 

“that’s because i had to,” she points out. “bad luck. you? you earned the right to kill them,” she sneers, and the minute the word is out of her mouth, enobaria decides she hates her. she didn’t work this hard to get told off by some bitch that doesn’t even know how to hold a sword right or how to kill clean (she’d seen the twelve year old from three, the kid with the head she’d smashed in. he’d bled out slow, maroon on the white snow, until ruby had decided she’d had enough of his moaning and put her sword into his heart). enobaria throws a knife into her forehead before she even knows what she’s done. 

the girl from district eleven dies with a proud smile on her face. 

//

enobaria finds the girl and boy from seven sleeping huddled together in front of a campfire. she kicks them slightly to wake them. “how sweet,” she says, and the boy jolts awake, fear in his eyes. “aspen, run!” he yells, before enobaria stabs him in the heart. the girl’s scrambled up out of the sleeping bag and is trying to make a run for it when enobaria puts a knife in the base of her skull. she cleans off her knives and watches as the hovercraft takes their bodies away.

she kills the district eleven male out of almost pity. he’s half frozen to death by the time she finds him, and she slits his throat. he bleeds out quickly.

the district eight boy puts up a fight, or he tries, but enobaria’s quicker, and faster, and hasn’t been starving to death for the past few weeks, and she puts a knife in his heart before he manages to hit her. 

the girl from district five is hidden in a small shelter she’d made of branches and leaves. enobaria sets it on fire and throws a knife in the girl’s heart when she comes running out.

the girl from ten is fifteen, shy and starving, and she mimes whimpering when enobaria comes for her, only to leap up at the last moment with a cattle prod she must have taken from the cornucopia and stab enobaria’s thigh. _bitch!_ enobaria thinks, as the pain shoots through her leg. _she couldn't even lie down and die quietly like the cows she killed._ enobaria looks down at her wound long enough to determine that it’s not life threatening and then enobaria stabs the district ten girl until she looks less like a person and more like the peeled-open pomegranate she saw on the gamemakers’ table during her scoring session.

//

the boy from nine keeps somehow evading her. her food supply is empty. she hadn't been worried about rationing because she'd assumed (stupidly, she can almost hear agrippa chiding her) that the gamemakers had put enough food in there for four people for two or three weeks, which should have lasted her plenty of time. but they'd put less food than usual, probably hoping the pack would break up and they'd get some bloody, bloody deaths because of it.

 _fuckers_ , she thinks to herself. _they couldn't even wait two weeks for the pack to fall apart the way it usually does_. 

and hunting the district nine boy isn't made easier by her leg wound the girl from ten had given her. but she’d paid for it, enobaria reminds herself, trying to take her mind off the pain. she grins, thinking of the girl’s warm blood on her hands. that was the warmest she'd been since before the arena. even with the gloves, and coat and hat and scarf, everything was cold. everything was always cold.

but she can be warm again if she finds the district nine boy. she never has to feel cold again. 

//

in the end, she doesn't find him. he finds her. the false moon in the arena is high in the sky, and she's curled up in the cornucopia next to a small fire in a sleeping bag or two. she's a light sleeper; she's always been, even before the academy, so she hears him as he tries to be quiet and fails miserably. she cracks one eye open and can see him trying to be quiet as he approaches her. he’s got a makeshift weapon made out of a smashed glass thermos.

she tries to reach for her knives surreptitiously, but he sees her and runs towards her, tackling her. something with a dark screen and two blinking green lights flies out of his hand. she glances at it for a moment, and he smirks. 

“i had a device that tracked everyone in the arena,” he says, face dark. “i was always two steps ahead of you, you stupid bitch.” she hates the gamemakers then, hates them more than anything. if he didn’t have this stupid tracker, she’d have killed him by now and she wouldn’t be cold and starving. she hates him even more for not lying down and dying like the slaughterhouse tributes are supposed to. 

she watches as he shoves her knives out of the way and they skid away from her and then he hits her in the jaw and her head smashes back into the hard metal of the cornucopia and enobaria sees stars. he raises the glass thermos above his head and the minute he starts to bring it down, enobaria rolls away, scrambling for her knives. that stupid fucker didn’t even think to pin her down. 

and sure, she’s fast, but he’s bigger, and closer, and he kicks them away and she can see them skitter off into the darkness of the night. and then he screams and runs towards her, and she dodges his swing, but he’s expecting her to, now, and he uses his other hand to get a punch into her jaw. she stumbles, holding her jaw, and falls onto the ground. he stands over her, straddling her (he must have learned from his mistake fuck fuck _fuck_ ) and as he raises the thermos above her again she sees it now — he kills her and goes back home to his stupid fucking family and she’s just another dead district two girl and she can’t - she _won’t_ let that happen. his adam's apple bulges right in front of her, and she remembers the way the mutt ripped coral’s throat out, and she knows what she’s going to do.

and as elegantly as rising from water, she pushes herself up, and bites down on his throat, and then she _pulls_.

his skin makes a horrific ripping sound, and enobaria watches as his blood spills onto the white snow, a stark contrast in the moonlight. she’s still staring at the bright red blood on the artificially-white snow when (it seems like twenty years later, but must only be minutes) the announcer’s voice fills the empty arena. 

“the victor of the sixty-second hunger games, enobaria mcclave of district two!”

//

enobaria wakes up in a white hospital bed to the taste of blood. agrippa is sitting next to her. her body is tense, and she's cracking her knuckles in some kind of repetitive nervous tic enobaria doesn't understand. 

“what are you doing?” enobaria says, or tries to say, but instead it comes out more as a wordless groan.

agrippa turns to look at her. she reaches out her hand, and enobaria takes it, confused. agrippa's never been this affectionate before. that must mean there's something wrong. “i'm so sorry,” agrippa says, and before enobaria can ask why, she sees the fear in her eyes and knows something is wrong with her.

she runs a tongue over her teeth and there's a new sensation — one that's sharp and feels this close to cutting her tongue into slivers. her teeth. that's what they've done. she lets out another groan that's meant to say, “why?”

agrippa answers. “this is the price we pay,” she says. “you got to live, but now they control you. they own you. you won, babygirl, but this is your price.” she squeezes enobaria’s hand. “this is your legacy. ripping teff’s throat out with your teeth.” she smiles sadly again, and then stands up, stretching. “tiberius said he'd watch you for a while, so i could get some rest. you should too,” she says in a tone that implies that is not a suggestion but a command. enobaria smiles, albeit a bit nervously. that sounds more like the agrippa she knows. 

as she's leaving, agrippa adds, “oh, and if anyone asks, you wanted them done.” and then enobaria is left alone in a room full of white with the taste of blood in her mouth and she's really not sure that much has changed. 

//

it takes enobaria a week to stop cutting her mouth open every time she speaks. 

whenever she smiles now, anyone who isn’t a victor shies away from her in some strange mixture of awe and fear. it takes her longer to remember to stop smiling.

//

“enobaria mcclave!” caesar says. “we’re so glad to have you back.”

“it’s so good to be here,” she says, and smiles, wide, with all her teeth showing, and caesar gasps over-exaggeratedly, leaning back in his chair away from her.

“what happened to your teeth?” he asks, his eyes wife with mock fear.

“i had them done,” she says. “i wouldn’t want to forget the most important moment of my games, after all.”

caesar grins at her. “i love it! so unique! i bet you that everyone in the capital will be clamoring to get their teeth done just like yours!” enobaria does not point out that this will make them no longer unique. she just smiles again, a close-lipped smile this time, and caesar turns on the games recap.

it’s almost hideous, all that red against the white snow. enobaria never noticed it before. when they get to the district ten girl’s death, enobaria can almost feel fawn glaring at her from the crowd. enobaria just shoots her a toothy grin. it’s not like she didn’t bludgeon mason and vesta to death last year. she hasn’t got any kind of bullshit moral ledge to stand on. 

enobaria holds her head high and watches herself rip out a boy’s throat and soaks in the crowd’s cheers and tries to forget that she’s a monster.

//

“hey,” agrippa says, one afternoon back in district two (or, at least, enobaria thinks it’s afternoon. the sunlight is filtering in through the window, which probably means it's laster in the day, but enobaria wouldn’t know, she doesn’t go anywhere, so what does the time matter?), after they’ve been home about a month, and enobaria is sulking on the couch. “you can’t sulk around forever, you know.”

“why not?” enobaria pouts, because, sure, she might’ve trained her entire life to kill, and in the arena that was easy, it was kill or be killed, but what they never told her is that the hard part is after the games when you’ve ripped out a boy’s throat with your teeth and everyone around you sees you as a monster or a spectacle. 

“because i won’t let you,” agrippa says from where she’s standing in the kitchen area, pointing a wooden spoon menacingly at enobaria. “brutus is hosting dinner tonight. you’re going. non-negotiable. you need to talk to someone who isn’t me.”

“do i have to?” enobaria whines, and agrippa just shoots her a glare. fine. agrippa can make her go, but she can’t make her have a good time.

//

a tall, bald man opens the door with a flourish, and agrippa smiles at him. “how are you, you old bastard?” she says, and he levels a glare at her for a moment, before bursting out laughing. enobaria jumps. 

“haven’t looked in the mirror lately, have you?” he laughs, and agrippa chuckles slightly before turning around and seeming to remember enobaria’s presence. 

“brutus, this is enobaria,” she says, and brutus offers enobaria a nod before moving aside, and they enter. the house is nice, if minimally decorated. it reminds enobaria of her own. of course it does. all the houses in the victor's village look the same. when they reach the dining hall, enobaria is surprised to find two people making out on the table. the taller one, the man, is lean and lanky in a way that suggests more muscle than one would think he had on first glance, and the smaller one, the girl, has honey-blonde hair and is standing in heels that look taller than any enobaria has ever seen. his shirt is half-off, and her dress is in a puddle of purple fabric on the floor beside them, leaving her only in a bra and panties. enobaria tries not to stare. agrippa clears her throat, and the girl hops up with a salacious grin. the man at least has the decency to look embarrassed, his face flushing red as he scrambles to get his shirt on. 

“enjoy the show?” she asks, with a wink as she slips her dress back over her head. agrippa rolls her eyes. 

“not as much as you’d like me to,” she quips, and then, turning to enobaria, says, “this is cercina and octavian. and yes, she is always like this.” enobaria blinks. 

cercina grins. “you're no fun, ’grippa,” she says. “not even going to let me tease your virgin a little?”

“i'm not a virgin,” enobaria snaps. this is true. she’d had sex with the top girl in her year in a broom closet after enobaria passed one of her kill tests. she didn’t know whether they’d gotten more off to each other or to the remnants of the blood underneath enobaria’s nails.

“don’t tell snow,” cercina sing-songs, dragging a finger along enobaria’s collarbone. enobaria shivers, and agrippa levels a glare at her. 

“what does she mean?” enobaria's eyes grow wide with fear, her mind racing. they'd had training on kissing and shit like that, for the cameras, but does that mean? is she going to have to -

she's cut off when the man speaks for the first time. “be nice to the girl, cece,” octavian says, putting a hand on enobaria’s shoulder. it would be comforting, except enobaria remembers the last time she touched another person and it was when she ripped his throat out, so it’s not, not really. she swallows, and octavian walks out of the room, and adds, “i'm going to go find brutus. see what's taking so long.”

“you’re no fun,” cercina calls after him, and as she says that, another woman enters the room, with dark hair and steely grey eyes. 

she cocks an eyebrow. “well, that's rude,” she says, and then glares at cercina. “what have i told you about having sex in here? now all i'm going to be able to think about at dinner is you fucking octavian!” cercina covers her mouth and snorts, looking like a cat who ate the canary, and not at all ashamed of herself.

“you're not my mother, breccia,” cercina says, with a crooked grin. 

“no, but i am your mentor, and that might as well be the same thing,” breccia retorts. cercina is about to reply, when two other people enter. a shorter woman with a buzz cut walks in first, followed by a man with grey hair. enobaria recognizes one of them. 

“tiberius?” she asks hesitantly. she hasn't seen him since before her games. he nods, and she looks down, before saying quietly, “sorry about magmus.” enobaria does feel bad. magmus didn’t even get a chance. that lynx mutt was too strong. and she’d left him to die.

he smiles softly at her. “so it goes,” he says. 

cercina laughs behind enobaria, a mean, cackling laugh, and enobaria turns to face her. “forget about the games!” she half-shouts. “you ripped a boy’s throat out with your teeth! big deal!” she pauses here, and then points to agrippa, “agrippa over there,” she adds, “beat people's brains in with rocks! lyme,” she says, gesturing towards the woman with the buzz cut, who enobaria assumes must be lyme, “disemboweled people with her sword. her final opponent was holding his guts in as he tried to escape her! petra hacked off her opponents’ limbs with a machete. i slit peoples’ throats after making out with them. breccia beheaded ten people. octavian drove a pickaxe through some kid’s eye and it came out her skull. arsinoe smashed kids’ heads in and then told a kid’s parents that he was bloodbath fodder. brutus snapped childrens’ necks. cassia, may her soul be like stone, knocked people out with the butt of her whip before strangling them with it! the games - ” she gestures wildly here, as if to prove her point, “ - are the games. we don't have time for you to be sorry about a boy you didn't kill!” 

enobaria blinks. it hits her now, really hits her, that these people she’d watched for years were the same people who’d done these things. and now she’s standing among them. she’s one of them. and suddenly, she doesn’t feel quite so alone.

//

it’s halfway through dinner when enobaria works up the nerve to ask about something everyone at the academy has been gossiping about for years. “so, are you and brutus secretly in love?” she asks, gesturing to lyme and brutus. 

brutus chokes on his meal, and lyme lets out an amused snort. “no,” she says, rolling her eyes as iggy thumps on brutus’s back. lyme sticks out her tongue at brutus. “ew, gross,” she says, and brutus rolls his eyes. 

“yuck,” brutus says. “never.”

from the other end of the table, tiberius adds, “if anyone here is secretly in love with brutus, it’s me.”

“the closest the two of them get to fucking is punching each other in the face,” agrippa says, her tone half-joking, despite the serious expression on her face. 

lyme frowns at agrippa and takes a bite of her potatoes. “unlike fucking each other,” she says, with a pointed glare at cercina, “punching each other in the face keeps things interesting,” she says, and enobaria snorts. she's starting to like these people.

//

her victory tour starts in twelve. the eulogy she gives is some sentimental, sappy shit that thanks the tributes for their sacrifice. almost everyone standing in the crowd looks like they’d keel over in a strong wind, and enobaria is glad when it’s time for the victors’ lunch. she and agrippa and cordelia solis, district two’s escort who has avoided enobaria as though she was some kind of disease-ridden rat ever since enobaria got back, and who looks just as ridiculous as she did before the games, with her hair up in a tight, swirling headpiece and golden eyelashes that are so long enobaria is slightly surprised she doesn’t flutter away every time she blinks, all head back into the justice building and into a dining room, where district twelve’s only living victor sits with a man enobaria assumes must be their mayor, who smiles tightly at enobaria. the three of them take a seat at the table.

“nice to see you again, ‘grippa,” haymitch abernathy slurs. enobaria wrinkles her nose. she can tell by his smell that he’s already drunk.

agrippa doesn’t smile at him. “and you as well, haymitch,” she says tightly. 

cordelia frowns, her face pinching, and says, “isn’t it funny how you’re always inebriated when i see you?” in a tone that implies she doesn’t find it very funny at all. enobaria is tempted to stab her with a dinner fork. this is not the first time she's had this thought. this will probably not be the last, she muses.

haymitch’s face twists, and enobaria sees something dark in it, something she’s only seen before in recordings of previous games. it’s a look she imagines her own face had when she ripped out that boy’s throat. “when you have to watch kids die year after year — and not just because of the games, mind you, our kids are starving because we’re not capitol favorites like you fucking lapdogs over in two — then you can comment on the state of my,” he pauses here, and scrunches up his face like he’s thinking really hard, and then mockingly says, “inebriation.” the escort frowns even more. “and until then,” he adds, tone harsh and dark and low, “i’ll thank you to keep your damn mouth shut.”

cordelia’s mouth snaps shut. enobaria resists the urge to grin and instead eats a strawberry from her plate. the rest of the meal is surprisingly quiet.

//

enobaria bites the inside of her cheeks during the entire eulogy for the district ten tributes. she remembers how the district ten girl looked like a peeled-open pomegranate when enobaria was done with her. she can feel the people’s eyes on her, glaring and full of hatred because sure, she ripped the district nine boy’s throat out but at least you could tell who he was when she was done. when she leaves the stage she goes to the bathroom and throws up blood in the porcelain white toilet. and then her head starts spinning because of the red blood on the white ceramic and she pukes again before going to the victor’s lunch. fawn glares at her the entire time, and enobaria just smiles and flashes her teeth. 

//

agrippa gives her tiny white pills before her speech in district nine and she gives a eulogy for the boy whose throat she ripped out with her teeth while her insides feel fuzzy and warm and looks into the eyes of the people who hate her for winning, for being from a district where they get wins every other year, practically, and don’t even need the victor’s rations, and she wants to scream at them, “fuck you,” because what they don’t know is all the victor’s rations go to the academy kids anyway, or their parents, and if you’re from the quarry you’re fucked unless you want to sentence your kid to years of training only for them to go into the arena to die. she gets through the eulogies, somehow, and stumbles off the stage and into the justice building where the two victors from district nine are waiting for her. they won a couple years apart, enobaria’s pretty sure. she remembers watching the boy win when when she was little. before the academy. she remembers watching his games, sitting in front of the crackling old television in her living room, her baby brother curled into her side sleeping.

the older one, the woman, doesn’t smile at her. the younger one, the man, does. he was a career victor, ran with the pack until food ran low and took off on his own and let the pack tear each other apart. he’d starve, they reasoned, but from an agricultural district like nine, he didn’t, and he came back and stabbed the district one boy in the heart with a knife. the woman, enobaria remembers, used a sickle as her primary weapon. 

“hi,” the man says. enobaria can feel agrippa’s hand on her shoulder, keeping her upright. she’s grateful. “i’m emmer, and this is maizie,” he adds, gesturing to the woman beside him. she gives enobaria a close-lipped grin.

“‘baria,” enobaria slurs. a small trail of blood spills out of her mouth and down her dress. between the drugs and the teeth, her speech is slurred, and she doesn’t have the focus to keep her teeth from tearing her cheeks are raw and bloody. when she speaks, she can see both emmer and maizie go white. 

“did she - ” emmer begins to ask, and stops, looking around, and enobaria blinks, confused. 

“no,” agrippa whispers, and then the last thing enobaria hears before she passes out is the sound of an unfamiliar voice murmuring, “that poor dear.”

// 

the rest of the victory tour passes in a drug fueled haze. first it's sedatives, to keep her calm in nine, and then it's painkillers, because her mouth cracks open and bleeds every time she moves since she sliced it open when she was on sedatives. she doesn't remember much of it. she isn't sure she wants to. 

//

snow comes early in district two. enobaria sits on the couch in her home in the victor’s village with the heat turned up so much that she’s sweating and stays in bed until petra comes barging in from next door. enobaria usually doesn’t mind it, she likes petra. she won back in fifty-six, after chopping up opponents with a machete, but you’d never know it from the way she acts — she's bright and bubbly, the picture of a perfect victor. but today enobaria just wants to be left alone, so she very much minds petra's intrusion.

“it’s snowing!” petra yells as she runs up the stairs, like enobaria isn’t keenly aware of the white bullshit falling her window. “come on, get dressed!” she adds, as she enters the bedroom without knocking. enobaria glares at her, but she doesn’t think petra notices.

enobaria blinks at her from inside a bundle of blankets. “get dressed for what?” she asks, and then, annoyed, adds, “i am dressed.”

petra grins widely, and she grabs enobaria’s hand and tugs her out of bed. “for the snowball fight!” she says, and enobaria drops her hand. 

“no,” enobaria says. her entire body stiffens at the thought of going out in the snow. petra’s face falls. 

“come on, please,” she wheedles. enobaria closes her eyes and she can feel the sharp pangs of the cold on her toes and fingers and nose and can hear the crunch of the lynx mutt walking in the snow (she’d heard caesar refer to it as such during the recap) and she shakes her head. 

“at least come watch,” petra says, and enobaria acquiesces, and lets petra drag her down stairs and sit her on the couch in front of the front window and pull the curtains open. there’s no sun on the snow like there was in the arena. she can see the other victors outside, throwing balls of snow at each other, and petra lets some snow in as she goes out to join them. enobaria watches the small piles of snow by her front door melt, and wraps her blankets tighter around herself.

after a while, brutus comes in without knocking and sits next to her on the couch. they sit like that for a while, quietly, before brutus says gruffly, “i hate that shit.”

“what?” enobaria asks, confused.

“the snow,” he says gruffly. “but petra seems to love it, and lyme wouldn’t pass up a chance to hit me with a ball of snow if it punched her in the face, so i join ‘em. easier to join ‘em than beat ‘em, or whatever.”

“i hate it too,” enobaria says, and another long silence passes before enobaria quietly murmurs, “it reminds me of the arena. all sharp cold pangs and the crunch when you walk. even just looking at it makes me feel like i’m back there.” she shudders a little.

brutus nods at her. he seems like a man of few words. enobaria can appreciate that. finally, he says, “my da used to leave me outside overnight if i’d been bad. once it’d snowed, and i damn near froze to death. only reason i didn’t was my ma brought me inside once she saw me turning blue.” 

enobaria bites her lip and can suddenly taste the iron tang of blood in her mouth. “i'm sorry,” she says. 

brutus shrugs. “not your fault. just like the arena wasn't your fault. you can hate the snow all you like. just remember you’re not the only one,” he says, leaning over and squeezing her knee. he stands up and troops back outside, and enobaria watches the rest of the snowball fight and doesn't feel quite so alone. 

//

the first time she goes to the capitol, she fucks a man because snow told her to. he warned if she got too close with those teeth of hers, there’d be consequences. she thinks she hates him.

she stumbles out of her hotel, blood boiling because she hates this, she hates how he thinks he owns her and she stumbles right into arsinoe, victor of the fifty-ninth, and petra. 

“easy,” petra says, and then looks at her more closely. “you okay?” 

enobaria wipes the blood off of her lips from where she’s been gnawing at the inside of her cheek. “snow just made me fuck someone,” she mutters, and arsinoe’s face softens.

“i know what’ll make you feel better,” petra says, brightly, and she smiles in a way that makes enobaria think she’s right. she grabs enobaria’s wrist and leads her out of the building and into some back alley and down into what enobaria assumes must be a bar. 

the bartender has hair the color of peacock feathers and eyes that glitter, quite literally. “petra, arsinoe, good to see you as always. what can i get you?” he asks with a quick grin. arsinoe just raises an eyebrow. “whiskey as usual for the two of you, and for your guest?” enobaria nods to signal that she’d like the same thing. she doesn’t know much about liquor, but she thinks they have good taste. 

when the whiskey shots arrive, arsinoe downs one, and then looks enobaria dead in the eyes. “this,” she says, “will make you feel better.”

//

arsinoe’s right — it does make enobaria feel better. after the whiskey is gone, petra leads them to some kind of dance club, with lights that flash and a dance floor so dark enobaria finds it’s hard to tell who is who. they bounce in and out of clubs after, stumbling across the dance floor, avoiding the capitol citizens with cameras, enobaria wiping blood of her face the whole time. the whiskey had made her feel better, but had just made her mouth sting more. she supposes it’s the price she has to pay for not feeling like she wants to rip someone else’s throat out. they’re stumbling out of another club, enobaria’s hand wrapped around arsinoe’s waist for balance when enobaria hears someone shouting and freezes. 

“what do you think you’re doing?” the voice yells, and enobaria turns around to see iggy walking towards them. “you’re victors, do you want to end up on the front of every gossip magazine in the capitol?” he asks, his face dark. his dark hair shines in the streetlights. it looks like stars, enobaria thinks, and laughs to herself.

“and you, enobaria,” he says, “you vanished after your appointment. we thought something’d gone wrong, and with dahlia and calix still in the arena, we can’t risk that, do you understand?” he asks, his eyebrows raised, and enobaria nods. she’s swaying. petra had told her the alcohol does that. enobaria doesn’t mind. she feels warm inside. iggy turns to arsinoe, and enobaria hears him say, “you should have known better - ” and then arsinoe cuts him off. 

“you aren’t my mentor - ” arsinoe snaps, but before she can finish her sentence, enobaria’s on the ground. 

the cobblestones are dirty, she notices, and then feels someone picking her up. she can’t see him, not aside from his shirt when her eyes flicker open, but she can smell him. iggy smells like something smokey and earthy; there’s something that reminds enobaria of trees and fire. she wraps her arms around his neck and feels like a child again as iggy carries her back to the penthouse. she hasn’t felt this at home since she was small and pretended to still be asleep so her father would carry her and her brother to bed.

//

brutus packs them a picnic lunch, even after lyme spends three hours telling him that no one’s going to eat it because they’ll be too busy swimming.

“stick it up your ass, then, lyme, so it won’t go to waste,” brutus says with a smirk, and lyme punches him in the arm hard enough for a bruise to bloom. 

they’re spending a day at the quarry to celebrate. district two’s done well lately, with brutus’s boy getting the crown back in sixty-seven, and tiberius bringing it home again this year, with the youngest career victor ever. she’s fifteen, another one of tiberius’s girls with daddy issues and heartbreak written all over her face. he always picks the girls at the academy with too many daddy issues to get laid. he’s got a type, enobaria thinks. then again, so do most of the mentors. agrippa, and her rage filled girls, brutus, and his noble kids. even petra, happy-go-lucky with a machete, knew how to cut deep enough that her victims bled out within minutes. cercina, with her pretty girls that hide bloodlust under their ribbons and lace and wear lipstick the same shade as their victim’s blood.

enobaria lies in the sun now, her fingers loosely wrapped around a smooth quarry stone. she turns it over and over in her hands, watching nero, brutus, iggy, ryker, lyme, petra, and octavian dive into the water. cercina perches on a rock near the blanket, rubbing some kind of lotion into her skin.

“boys will be boys,” cercina says, with a polished laugh. arsinoe rolls her eyes with a hint of annoyance. she’s skipping black stones along the lake’s surface.

“oh, fuck off,” arsinoe snaps. “just because you like to pretend you’re all pretty and polished doesn’t mean you didn’t slit a boy’s throat while giving him future wet dreams.”

cercina raises an eyebrow. “and what’s the problem with that?” she says, with the implication in her tone that she’s done with the conversation. she’s put down her lotion in exchange for her knitting. she puts her sunglasses on, from where they’d been previously perched atop her head.

arsinoe huffs. “it’s so like you to pick such a girly talent,” she mutters, sending another rock all the way across the lake.

cercina smiles, but there’s something dark and scary underneath it. “say that again when i put my knitting needles in your neck, you bitch,” she says. the new victor, cali, snorts from beside enobaria.

“play nice,” jasper says commandingly, opening his eyes and glancing between the two of them. in all honesty, enobaria had thought he was asleep. he’s not done so well the past few years. the eldest living victor, he won the fifteenth games, and his time in the arena is catching up to him now.

“have i ever done anything else?” cercina asks, batting her eyes, and arsinoe glowers at her. enobaria snorts.

“the first time i met you you were having sex with octavian on brutus’s dining room table,” enobaria says.

“your point?” cercina asks.

“i wouldn’t exactly call that playing nice,” enobaria says, flipping the stone over in her palm. they're playing some kind of game, out in the water, that involves pairs sitting on each other's shoulders and trying to knock the other down. nero has his sibling victor petra situated firmly on his shoulders as she yells incoherently, trying to knock lyme off brutus’s shoulders. 

“oh, i _would_ ,” cercina purrs, and arsinoe mock-gags. enobaria laughs a little, and turns the stone over in her hand, and feels the warmth of the sunlight, and she thinks the last time she felt this alive she was half-frozen to death and had just ripped a boy’s throat out.

//

they use knives as ante. even victors whose primary weapons weren’t knives have them (they’re easier to conceal and there’s not a victor alive who walks around unarmed. or a victor dead — cassia was buried with her weapon, as was cyrus).

“i’ve got my eye on that butterfly knife,” lyme crows when she gets her cards, with a wide grin, and tiberius frowns. he’s got a bad hand, then, enobaria thinks. tiberius couldn’t hold a poker face to save his life. the newer victors, nero and cali, have teamed up with their mentors. cali rolls her eyes at her mentor and frowns. 

“why can’t you keep a straight face, old man?” she huffs. tiberius frowns again, but this time at her. 

“i might be an old man, but i’ll still kick your ass,” he threatens, and nero snorts from across the table. 

“told you that mouth was gonna get you in trouble,” he crows, like it’s something he’s proud of. 

“not if i kick your ass so hard you shit your pants for a week,” cali says, and brutus snorts. 

“keep it in your pants,” brutus says. “we don’t need another cece and octavian if we want to actually play.” he inclines his head at cercina, who is currently on top of octavian, her mouth on his neck.

“what _ever_ ,” cali huffs, flopping back in her chair. “let’s just play so we can get this hand over with already.” she throws down their cards, and the rest of the table puts theirs down, and in the end, lyme takes home her butterfly knife. small consolation for her tribute coming in second, with her head smashed in by venus of district one, but enobaria thinks some consolation prizes are better than none.

//

enobaria isn’t planning on mentoring. agrippa asks her if she wants to, before the seventy-second. she’s been out of the arena long enough. but she says no. she knows she doesn’t know how to get a kid out of the arena when she herself barely got out of the arena. but. but. she’s at brutus’s for dinner one night, like they all do every other week or so (because what’s the point of having a victor with a cooking talent if you don’t let him make everyone dinner every once in a while), and she’s gone upstairs to get some of his whiskey out of the study when she sees the files for the potential tributes for seventy-third games. on the top is a tribute named flint damon. he’s a quarry kid, just like her. quarry kids don’t usually make it this far. she looks at flint’s photograph again, and she sees her brother. she misses her brothers. she hasn’t even seen them since before her games. victors don’t have families. 

she walks down to the dining room without the whiskey. “hey!” brutus calls. “you forgot the whiskey.”

“have you submitted your paperwork for seventy-three yet?” enobaria asks, standing in the doorway. 

“are you out of your mind?” cercina cackles. breccia quiets her with a glare. enobaria can feel all of their eyes on her.

“no, why?” brutus asks, his head cocked to the side like a confused dog. he takes a bite of his food slowly.

“because i saw the files, and...and i have to mentor flint. i just have to,” enobaria explains. “it’s important.” she doesn’t know how to say that she’s a quarry kid, and she owes him. owing isn’t something peacekeeper bastards understand, not really. she got out of her games, and magmus didn’t, and she owes the quarry. the quarry gives, and it takes. and it gave her up for sacrifice, like a lamb to the slaughter, and now she has to give back.

“is that all?” brutus asks, and enobaria nods. 

“why didn’t you bring the whiskey, then?” cercina asks, rolling her eyes, and enobaria laughs, heading back to the office to bring down the whiskey. she sees flint’s file and she picks it up, holding it close to her chest. she won’t let him lose. she’ll bring home her quarry boy even if it kills her.

//

she meets flint on the train after the reaping. he’s tall, taller than her, but he speaks softly and he moves slowly. enobaria gets the feeling it’s not because he’s gentle, but more because he knows exactly the kind of damage he can do. 

“hi,” enobaria says, and flint reaches out to shake her hand. 

“hello,” he replies. there’s a long beat of silence before he says, “make sure my family’s taken care of if i die. it’s the only reason i went into the academy,” he adds, and enobaria keeps her smile on but she feels her heart crack. 

“i’m here to make sure you can do that yourself,” enobaria says, and she does not tell him that she sends food packages to her family every month. victors might not have families, but tributes do. she does not tell him that if he wins he will never see his family again. he doesn’t need to know that once he wins the games, he will no longer want to. that his family will look at him like he’s a monster. that they won’t want to see him but they’ll still take his food all the same.

flint smiles for a brief moment, like the sun appearing on a cloudy day. “thank you.”

//

she sits in the mentor room next to cercina, who is watching her girl valentina with a sharp eye. valentina is an academy-bred girl, with dark brown hair and pale skin and cheekbones that could cut like a knife. she’d worn a dress made of dark pink velvet for her interview, and managed to pull off sexy and intimidating. she’d out-shone flint, but enobaria knows — all that glitters isn’t gold. that shine will wear off her in the arena. she can see allura and valor across the room, watching their kids, emerald and alexandrite, or andrei for short. emerald is tall and leggy, with golden hair that cascades down her back, as beautiful as she is deadly, and andrei has a dark look in his eye that you forget the moment he smiles. if he wins, he’ll surely be a gloss, or a finnick. one of the pretty, pretty boys the capitol loves. but enobaria knows if andrei knows what’s good for him, he’ll die a pretty, pretty death in the arena. 

as they rise into the arena, enobaria can see they’re in a ruined city. she lets out a breath. after the countdown goes off, flint runs to the cornucopia, stopping only on his way to slam a district five girl down to the ground. she lands on a shattered metal beam, and it folds her ribcage open like a present. enobaria holds her breath until the bloodbath is over and her boy stands with the other careers, his sword in hand — a bloody, bloody prince among the ruins.

//

flint’s pack consists of him, valentina, the district ones, andrei and emerald, the kids from district four, which are a boy named neptune, who is fifteen, and by all appearances should’ve been bloodbath fodder but scored a ten, and a girl named lynn, who is small but muscular, with a nasty scar that rips down her shoulder (in the blistering arena, the sun shines down unrelentlessly, and all tributes had stripped off their jackets almost immediately, exposing the tributes’ sleeveless shirts), and the girl from ten, named deryn, with jet black hair who uses some kind of nasty looking chain-hook weapon. enobaria had seen it tear out two tributes’ throats during the bloodbath. she’d be willing to bet that weapon was something they’d put in there especially for deryn. 

the boy from ten, rufus, was strong enough to be in the pack, but he’d declined, taking a singular backpack and running as far from the career pack as he could. enobaria switches cameras back to his boy after determining that rufus isn’t likely to be a threat. he’s too cocky, thinking he can take on the careers by himself. she snorts to herself. he’ll be dead in a week.

//

the pack breaks two weeks in when there’s one less water bottle than there was the night before and they’ve been in the arena too long to remember that stealing is one way to win the games. 

or they know this is how the games go, something in the back of enobaria’s mind whispers. and this might as well be a well-choreographed dance.

either way, they split, and valentina and deryn immediately take off in seperate directions. leaping over piles of bricks and rubble, leaving flint behind to face emerald, andrei, and lynn (neptune had been killed a week in when he’d drunk water from a dripping pipe that had killed him. the rest of the pack had been very careful not to make his mistake).

lynn catches emerald across the back of her legs with her fishing knife and emerald goes down. andrei screams and drops to his knees in front of her, and takes the blunt end of flint’s sword to the temple. the cannon booms, and enobaria doesn’t look up from her screen but she can hear valor sigh and the clatter of his headphones as his screen goes dark.

allura’s screen blinks out a moment later, when lynn’s knife finds its way into emerald’s chest, and enobaria can hear the sound of distant cannons from the arena.

and sure, they say that district two doesn’t fight dirty, but you can’t win in the arena if you don’t fight dirty, and before lynn can stand up from where she’d been kneeling as she’d stabbed emerald, flint picks her up by the back of a neck like a cat would her kittens and snaps her neck. the distant sound of the cannon rings in enobaria’s ears and she can hear briony spitting curses in the background as enobaria smiles.

//

valentina and rufus meet first, the false sun shining high in the sky, her stumbling across him after carefully scraping a cut on her cheek that only accentuates her cheekbones. 

“rufus, they...” she says, bringing herself almost to tears. “they...they turned on me. i couldn’t take them on my own, please, you’ve got to help me,” she begs, falsely-hysterical. 

rufus doesn’t answer, only nods, and motions for her to follow him back to his camp. once there, it’s only a matter of moments before valentina is batting her eyes and inviting her way onto his lap and she’s kissing him, and he’s kissing her back, surprised and a little blushy, and enobaria knows what comes next, she watched cercina’s games and sure as hell her protege is going to follow in her footsteps when — 

— when rufus stabs her with her own dagger. valentina gasps, her mouth painting a pretty little ‘o’ and enobaria resists the urge to snort. “you mother _fucker_ ,” she says. “you stabbed me!”

rufus nods, smirking. “damn right i did,” he says. “i know what you do, you and your pretty little self. kiss the boys and make them die.” he pauses for a long minute before adding, “this boy killed you first.” and it’s then that the cannons boom. 

//

deryn finds flint hiding in a building from the lizard-like mutts that are crawling out of the sewer. he’d lost his sword to one of them earlier, and was defenseless against them. the two of them put on no pretenses. they both know only one of them will come out of this alive. deryn swings her chain hook and it embeds itself in flint’s arm, and flint pulls it out, and enobaria gasps. everyone knows that you don’t pull weapons out, unless you want to bleed out.

but flint jerks the chain hook closer to him and then deryn stumbles closer to him, collapsing, and flint wraps the chain around her neck and pulls it tighter and tighter until the cannon booms and deryn’s face is blue.

he rips a sleeve off one of his jackets and makes a makeshift tourniquet. enobaria thinks she’s never been prouder.

//

they annouce a feast the next day, and it’s there that rufus and flint finally meet. 

flint arrives before rufus, putting on the body armor he’d been given, and when rufus arrives, flint waits for him to turn his back before rushing him and he slams into rufus who whips around and lands a hit straight to flint’s jaw and flint staggers back but he recovers and slams the brick in his hand into rufus’s head until the cannon booms and the announcement comes and enobaria can finally breathe again.

//

flint wakes up in a white room with a white bed and enobaria sits next to him even though all this white is making her feel claustrophobic and like she can’t breathe but she paints a smile on her face and holds his hand and tells him he’s won and the smile on his face makes the past weeks of sleepless nights and cheeks chewed raw more than worth it.

//

flint’s remained remarkably well adjusted, for a victor. even for a victor with enobaria mcclave as a mentor.

but enobaria knows the tables will turn on the victory tour. even arsinoe, who has had three emotions in her life, one of them being rage, broke down to agrippa on her tour, saying that ‘she was a monster’ and that ‘she was just like him’. and petra, bright-eyed petra, broke down during her tour when people yelled at her, calling her a baby-killer and brutus had to pull her off the stage before she caused more damage. of course, after her outburst, snow sent video of petra’s parents being shot point blank as a reminder that she should behave. _at least,_ enobaria muses, _the only person i hurt on my victory tour was myself_.

//

district five is the worst. flint’s a pinnacle of career honor; enobaria knows that’s why brutus had his file, but the girl from five, the first death, the one he shoved onto a steel pole so hard her ribcage opened...that’s the bloodiest his deaths got. and five hasn’t won in since jules back in sixty-eight, and not for years before that, anyway, so enobaria isn't expecting a great welcome, but it gets worse when he's on stage, shaking like a leaf because sure the academy made tributes but it sure as hell didn't make being a victor any easier. if anything, enobaria thinks they might’ve made it worse. when you're from a non-career district and come out alive, you consider it a miracle, but when you're from a career district and you make it out, you don't know what to do with yourself. you already did what you were trained to do. 

and five is the worst — they haven't made it past the bloodbath since jules and they're angry and sure it's not only at flint but he's the newest victor and he's _right there_. 

after five, flint breaks down crying on the train and enobaria gives him sleeping pills so he doesn't have to feel anymore. she wishes she could take them too. 

//

they announce the twist for the quarter quell, and enobaria screams in rage, smashing a lamp. they’d watched the announcement at brutus’s, all of them together. petra stares at the television in shock, and arsinoe stands up and throws a punch into brutus’s wall. at the stare from agrippa, she just mutters, “i’ll pay for it later,” before stalking out to do god knows what. octavian is on the edge of tears, holding on to cercina’s hand as though it was his only lifeline. jasper just sighs, already exhausted. enobaria doesn’t know what they’ll do if jasper gets reaped. he’s too old. he won’t survive the arena again. he wasn’t even a career victor — careers didn’t emerge until after the first quarter quell, and he won back in fifteen. maybe brutus will volunteer. career honor, and all that. she’s already made up her mind — she won’t let flint take jasper’s place. she just pulled him out of the arena, he’s not ready for it again. none of them are. 

she realizes she’s biting her lip, blood dripping down onto brutus’s white carpet. _this is all that girl on fire’s fault_ , enobaria thinks to herself. _why couldn’t she just kill that stupid fucking boy?_ she’d already killed so many others that another death wouldn’t count. the only thing that consoles her is knowing the girl on fire will end up in the arena again (she is twelve’s only living female after all), and enobaria makes up her mind right then and there that if she ends up in the arena, she’s going to to rip out katniss everdeen’s throat herself.

//

enobaria wears a gold dress to the reaping. “ladies first!” cordelia says, and enobaria gets flashbacks to the day she was first reaped. well. volunteered. this year, she realizes, is the first year two’s reaping will actually be a lottery since the academy was founded. “enobaria mcclave!” cordelia says, tone bright as ever, and enobaria walks up to the stage. she flashes her teeth at the camera. she’ll grin and bear it. isn’t that all she’s ever done?

“and for the boys,” she says, and reaches her name into the reaping ball and when the name is pulled enobaria’s heart catches in her throat. “flint damon!” enobaria bites her lip and swallows the blood. she just pulled her boy out. he can’t go back in, not with her. she can get him out, or she can get herself out, and she can’t do both. not if she’s in the arena. not without getting them both killed.

she doesn’t know whether she’s more afraid of killing him or losing him.

after what seems like an eternity, but is probably only about ten seconds, enobaria can hear brutus’s voice. “i volunteer as tribute!” he yells, gruffly, and cordelia smiles and welcomes him onstage.

“i’m sure everyone here knows your name, but go ahead and introduce yourself to the camera,” she says, and brutus nods.

“brutus dunne, victor of the forty-ninth games.” enobaria lets out a sigh of relief, and notices the cameras on her. she snarls. it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

//

enobaria spars with the trainers, and doesn’t use throwing knives. she doesn’t need the practice, and she knows it. she uses spears, and swords, and maces. who knows what fucking twist the gamemakers will pull over on them this time? she trains until the early hours of the morning, so much that her muscles scream. she trains until she can’t think anymore. she won’t let them think she’s an easy target. she’s going to go back into the games, and she’ll be damned if she goes down without a fight.

//

“enobaria mcclave, everyone!” caesar says, as she walks on stage for her interview. she's wearing a plain black mermaid style dress, with a neckline that dips down between her breasts to what enobaria is pretty sure is the bottom of her ribcage. enobaria flashes the crowd a smile and they cheer even louder. 

“how does it feel to be back?” caesar asks, the moment she sits down. “and only a year out of the mentoring chair, too.”

enobaria frowns. “well, i can't say i'm thrilled to be in the arena again, but i'm not exactly disappointed, either. i think i’ve got a fighting chance at taking home another crown.”

caesar chuckles. “i’d say so,” he says with a grin. “what do you have to say to your fans out there?”

“thank you for loving me,” enobaria says, honestly. “i couldn't have asked for anything better. except,” she pauses, frowns. she's not really sad, she's pissed as hell, but pissed as hell won't get her anywhere right now. “except i feel so bad for flint,” she admits, her voice cracking a little bit. she’s a two; she won’t cry, but hints of tears can’t hurt. “two years after winning, and he has to watch his mentor in the games. i can't imagine what i'd have done if agrippa went into the games after mine.”

caesar frowns at her. “yes, i can imagine,” he says, and pats her arm sympathetically. “don't worry, i promise we in the capitol will take good care of him in your stead.”

and enobaria swallows her fears and chokes out a thank you and does not say, _that's what i'm afraid of_.

//

the first thing enobaria notices about this new arena is the heat. it’s hot, and bright, and there’s water surrounding her.

it’s nothing like her first arena. enobaria thanks the stars above and the stone below for that. she doesn’t know what she would have done if it’d been cold and snowy. she remember that conversation with brutus her first winter after the games, and she thinks she doesn’t know what he would’ve done either. the countdown ends then, snapping her out of her thoughts, and enobaria dives into the water and swims to one of the little ledges extending from the cornucopia, where she pulls herself up at the same time brutus is pulling himself up, and he nods at her.

“head to the cornucopia,” he says. “i’ve got cecelia and woof.” enobaria nods, and takes off towards the cornucopia as brutus dives back into the water. she makes it to the cornucopia just as gloss is sticking a knife in fawn’s neck. enobaria suppresses a grin. served her right. she’s spent all these years judging enobaria for being a career and then she gets killed by one (fawn had become sort-of friends with enobaria as the years had passed. they’d gotten drunk together a few times, made out another few. but it’s easier to pretend enobaria doesn’t ache a little inside if she remembers the times fawn glared at her rather than the times she’d grinned). and cashmere turns around and tosses her a set of throwing knives. she flashes cashmere a grin. 

“thanks,” she says, and then adds, “your bro just knifed that district ten bitch. brutus is going after cecelia and woof. he’ll make it quick.” she pauses for a moment. if she thinks about it, she’s glad he’ll make it quick. cecelia has kids and woof’s old as stone and neither of them would last long in this arena, anyway. and bloodbath kills are always short and sweet,and if she knows anything about brutus, it’s that he’s no ruby. she still dreams about the way the girl from district nine’s guts went spilling into the snow. “sent me to find you and scour the cornucopia,” enobaria says. cashmere nods at her.

“heads up,” she says, and then enobaria turns around to see seeder running up one of the spires, and buries a knife in her forehead. 

as she does, she realizes that there’s something almost calming about the iron smell of blood in the air.

//

they build a small fire that night, and get water with a spile. cashmere’s mentor had fucked a gamemaker’s son to get that bit of info, so brutus had made sure to get the only spile from the cornucopia, and gloss had caught one of the tree rats and cooked it. they eat in silence for a long while before brutus says, “we need to deal with the other alliance.”

enobaria takes a bite of the chewy meat and nods. “yeah,” she says. “they’re outnumbering us.” cashmere nods in agreement. enobaria thinks that if this was their original games, cashmere and brutus would be making out by the fire and enobaria and gloss would be showing off their knife skills. brutus rubs his neck. he has back issues, enobaria suddenly remembers. he’s not as young as he used to be. she pushes the thought from her mind.

enobaria looks at gloss, who is staring into the fire dully. he hasn’t been on his game this year. enobaria takes another bite of her meat and tries to pretend she doesn’t care. whatever. the more people who aren’t on their game, the better. it doesn’t matter to her. not like she got drunk regularly with cashmere and gloss and if they weren’t all victors she’d call them friends. it doesn’t matter to her. enobaria takes another bite of her meat and watches the fire dance and doesn’t think about what will happen if the four of them are the only ones left. 

//

they see the other alliance heading for the cornucopia, and they make their way there as well.

they’re outnumbered, enobaria notes. by her count, there’s six of them, but the district threes, nuts and volts — enobaria snorts quietly to herself at that. johanna mason might be a lot of things, but polite and humorless are neither of them — can’t fight for shit. he spent his games hiding until he electrocuted six careers at once and she trapped people in nets before using a handmade garrote on them. and the district twelve boy, the star crossed lover, he can’t fight either. enobaria’d seen the way he killed the district eight girl last year — all messy, no grace. she’d take her bets that he can’t fight for shit either, which leaves three actual opponents against the four of them.

they make it to the cornucopia, and gloss goes for nuts, who is rocking back and forth and slits her throat. none of them move, or breathe, until the cannon goes off and beetee lets out a strangled cry, and katniss everdeen shoots gloss in the heart. enobaria glances at cashmere, whose face darkens and before she or brutus can move another muscle cashmere is running at katniss, and johanna mason pushes katniss out of the way and buries an axe in cashmere’s chest, and the twin cannons boom in succession. _born together, died together_ , enobaria thinks, before realizing katniss has turned her aim on her and brutus.

enobaria ducks beneath the bins to keep the food supplies clear as katniss fires an arrow at her, and brutus fights with finnick, and then suddenly, the cornucopia starts spinning and they’re both tossed into the water.

enobaria swims back to shore, and walks to the edge of the jungle, where brutus is waiting for her. she sits down next to them, and neither of them speaks for a long time, until brutus says, “guess it’s just the two of us, now.”

enobaria nods. “looks like it.”

//

when they venture back into the jungle, enobaria almost walks into a body. well. upon closer examination, it isn’t quite a body yet, but whoever it is has been torn to shreds.

“please,” they say, and it dawns on enobaria who it is. orson from ten, the one who won sixty-six. she looks at brutus, who frowns at her and shakes his head. the career honor thing to do is put him out of his misery, but they can’t, not until they know what — or who, enobaria reminds herself. maybe this is the year that audra from five or johanna from seven goes batshit crazy.

“what did this?” enobaria says, staring at the thing that used to be orson.

“there was this mutt,” he says. “big paws, big muscles, big teeth.” he convulses, which enobaria guesses is his version of a shudder. enobaria’s heart freezes. as far as they can tell, the gamemakers have put some throwbacks to older arenas that the tributes participated in. she saw gloss’s face when he realized it was blood rain. she knows they could’ve put the lynx mutt from her games in the arena.

“did it have tufted ears?” enobaria asks, trying to keep her voice from quivering, and brutus looks at her quizzically. 

the thing that used to be orson responds. “yes.” enobaria’s blood goes cold. she throws a knife into what she thinks used to be his skull and the cannon goes off. 

“we have to get away from here,” enobaria says. “i can’t fight that mutt again, brutus. i can’t.” she’s shaking a little, and her voice wavers.

something in her voice almost scares him, and it shows on his face. “yeah,” he says. “yeah, of course. let’s go,” he says, voice gruff, and the two of them start off in the opposite direction from the beast sector. enobaria looks over her shoulder often for glimpses of grey. she can’t let it hunt her. not again.

//

that night, brutus is on watch when he wakes her up. “volts and company are doing something with the wire,” he says. enobaria blinks. “figured you want me to wake you. knowing how he won, and all.” of course. beetee won by electrocuting six tributes, and they’re standing on a beach connected to a fucking ocean. of fucking course. it’s just enobaria’s luck.

enobaria runs her hand through her hair. “yeah, yeah, of course,” she says, trying to rub the exhaustion from her eyes. sleep in the arena has never come easy. always on edge, never sure when the next attack will come. she slept for what felt like a month after her first games, and it may well have been. she thinks, _i’d kill a man if it meant i could sleep that long again_ , and she snorts quietly to herself.

“here’s your knife,” brutus says, and tosses it to her. 

enobaria scowls at him as she catches it. “you could've cut off one of my fingers!” she snaps. 

brutus laughs, pushing himself up. “if i'd cut off one of your fingers, kid, you'd be getting slow. you'd deserve it.”

“fair enough,” enobaria says, and stands up, tucking her knife into her belt. 

they follow them at close range for a whole, until they split off into groups. “you get the girl on fire and jo,” he says. “i'll get peeta and finnick.”

enobaria nods, and climbs down the jungle towards the edge of the beach. she’s watching, waiting for the right moment to attack, when johanna knocks over the girl on fire and starts cutting her open. _well_ , enobaria thinks, _there’s my work done for me_.

she turns back to brutus, and she can see him standing above a figure she presumes is chaff. he must've been hiding in the jungle, enobaria surmises. probably the only thing he could do, what with the withdrawal. brutus hesitates for a moment before plunging his sword into chaff’s back. the tip of his sword comes out chaff’s chest. enobaria watches as brutus pulls his sword out, and realizes, too late, that peeta and finnick are behind him, and peeta snatches the trident from the ground where finnick must’ve dropped it and leaps on brutus and sure brutus is strong but he isn’t as young as he used to be and all enobaria can see is the _blood blood blood and the cannon boom rings in her ears and she’s the only career left and sure she won her first games that way but that was thirteen years ago she can’t do it on her own and all that’s left of brutus is blood blood blood_ — 

— and then there's a noise that sounds like a cannon boom but is a thousand times louder and she's thrown onto her back and the last thing enobaria sees is the sky going up in flames.

//

enobaria wakes up in a white room with white walls. “did i win?” she mumbles, looking around for agrippa. no one answers. she can hear what sounds like screams in the rooms beside her. she tries to sit up, but she's chained to the bed. funny, she thinks, they didn't do that after my last games. 

“hello?” she tries again, and this time, after a long moment, someone comes in the room. he's tall, wearing a white suit and surgical mask. 

“good, you're awake,” he says, despite not sounding very glad at all. his voice is mildly muffled by the mask. “what can you tell us about the rebels?”

“what rebels?” enobaria asks, and the man moves impossibly quickly towards her, grabbing one of her hands and bending her fingers back.

enobaria winces. “don't lie to me again,” the man says, and pulls her finger back even further until it snaps. enobaria doesn't scream.

//

the next time enobaria wakes up, she's in complete, freezing darkness. she tries to stand up, but it quickly becomes apparent she's chained to this metal chair. and then, out of nowhere, she can feel someone inject something icy into her veins. she does not scream. 

she doesn't start screaming until they rip out her fingernails one by one.

//

enobaria barely remembers what it was like, before this cold, cold room. they've shown her video of the outside, but she doesn't know what's real and what's the drugs they're giving her. she doesn't even know what the drugs they're giving her do. 

but one day, the door opens, and light from the hallway floods in, and it takes enobaria a moment to see who's standing in the doorway. for a moment, she thinks it's gloss, before she remembers that, well. it doesn't matter now. after a minute, she can see it's finnick, with stick-thin willowy annie by his side, and johanna fucking mason by his other side, and a dark haired boy enobaria doesn't recognize. finnick walks over to her, and unlocks the wrist shackles that chain her to the chair.

finnick holds out his hand. “do you want to go somewhere safe?” he asks, and enobaria swallows. nowhere has been safe since she stepped foot in the academy at age six. 

she pushes herself up off the chair and takes his hand. “yes,” she says, her voice hoarse from screams. “take me somewhere safe.”

//

they fly her out to the capitol for the victor’s vote. she sits in a chair next to beetee, who she hasn’t seen since the wedding. she kind of feels bad for the knife he got to the back at the cornucopia, but hey. all’s fair in love and the arena.

on her other side is annie cresta, who looks like she might blow over in a thin breeze. she hasn’t been doing so well since the news came back about finnick. not like it’s enobaria’s problem. 

when the vote gets to her, she doesn’t pause. “yes,” she says, running her tongue over her teeth and realizing, maybe for the first time, how young she was when she won the games. “i want those fuckers to pay.”

//

enobaria shows up at johanna mason’s doorstep three months after the assassination of coin. she’s never been the biggest fan of katniss everdeen. though, to be fair, katniss everdeen has never been the biggest fan of her. probably because enobaria is a career, she muses. and when you’re from a slaughterhouse district like twelve, then every career tribute is a big bad villain. but just because katniss everdeen is incapable of feeling more than one complex emotion about a person doesn't make enobaria a villain. despite all of that, though, even enobaria has to admit that what katniss did was ballsy. 

enobaria goes to johanna mason’s because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. they’ve always had a tentative kind of peace, the two of them. they’re kind of friends, or at least enobaria thinks so. maybe they would actually be friends if victors were allowed to have friends. plus there’s a strange kind of bond you get with someone when you listen to their screams while being tortured for months on end. and also they fucked once or twice. usually when one or the both of them was roaring drunk. _you can say what you want about johanna mason_ , she thinks to herself, as she waits for her to answer the doorbell, _but she knows how to eat a girl out_.

instead of johanna’s petite frame and dark hair, enobaria is greeted by a tall and willowy figure. it takes her a second before she realizes that it’s annie cresta. the crazy victor from four. she’s balancing a baby on her hip. enobaria blinks. annie looks at her, confusion in her eyes. she’s wearing a long skirt in various shades of blue and an oversized cream blouse. enobaria guesses it makes sense, now that she thinks about it. why else would johanna mason, of all people, move to district four?

“hi?” she says, finally. the baby on her hip fusses, and annie shifts him to her other hip. 

“i’m looking for johanna mason,” enobaria says. 

the fog in annie’s eyes clears. “oh!” she says. “okay. let me go get her,” she says, and turns back into the house, but not before handing the infant to enobaria with nothing more than a, “here, hold him.” 

enobaria has absolutely no idea what to do with any baby, let alone this one.he’s exceptionally warm and small, and he grins at her and reaches for her hair, giving it a soft tug. enobaria smiles at him, before remembering that her teeth are razor sharp points that terrify children. she’d made the mistake of smiling at one of the younger classes once while she was at victor's day at the academy and at least two had cried. they'd probably been made to run laps for that, because they were twos, and twos didn't cry, she muses, and she hates that. she didn't realize exactly how young they were back then. she didn't realize how young she was back then.

to her surprise, though, this baby just gurbles a laugh and reaches for her teeth. annie comes back then, with johanna trailing behind her, and enobaria hands the baby back to annie, who accepts him wordlessly. johanna looks different from when she last saw her. her hair is growing back in. the spiky pixie cut she’s sporting now suits her, though. enobaria doesn’t comment on it.

“do you want to come in?” johanna asks, after a long moment of silence, and enobaria nods. 

approximately five minutes later, enobaria is seated at the wooden kitchen table with a mug of what she thinks is tea in her hands. annie lingers in the doorway for a moment before saying, “i’d better give you two some privacy,” she says, and takes the baby and leaves. 

enobaria isn’t quite sure where she’s gone, and her heart races, but after a moment, she hears footsteps upstairs, and she relaxes. she’s just more comfortable knowing where everyone is. just another fucking present left over from president snow’s torture. johanna clears her throat. “what are you doing here?”

enobaria looks at the table. “what is annie cresta doing here?” she asks, and johanna laughs bitterly, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair.

“that’s none of your business, mcclave,” johanna says, tone a tad defensive. “and besides, i asked first.”

enobaria clicks her tongue. “childish, mason,” she says, and johanna glares at her. “fine, fine,” enobaria says, holding up her hands in mock surrender. “i didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“you have two,” johanna points out.

enobaria stares at her. she can’t be serious. there’s a long moment of silence before enobaria realizes that she must be. “i can’t go back to two,” enobaria says, quietly.

“why not?” johanna says, leveling a glare at her. 

“because i don’t want to stare at the reminders of my dead friends day in and day out,” enobaria says. “i thought you of all people would understand that, mason.”

johanna’s face hardens. “if you think that kid up there isn’t a reminder every damn second of what i lost, you’re dumber than i thought you were,” she hisses quietly.

“at least you still have her,” enobaria says, and she doesn’t know when it happened, but she’s started yelling. “i lost everyone! i lost my mentor, my friends, my family, my victor! all of them are gone. and anything left in two is just a reminder of the fact that they’re all dead because the capital wanted every victor dead because of what katniss fucking everdeen did and district thirteen didn’t want us either because we were careers! we were the capital’s lapdogs and they didn't want us either. it was only a matter of time before one or the other killed them. and every night i go to sleep and i think about how their soldiers killed flint and he was all alone and i didn't even get to say goodbye! he was so young,” enobaria says, her voice breaking. she’s crying angry tears that burn her eyes and she’s not sure when she started. “and he probably died so scared. he had nightmares after the arena and i held him because that's what you do for your victor.” she takes a deep, shaky breath. she doesn't like remembering this, but she also can't get the image out of her mind every time she closes her eyes. flint, slumped over, lying against the wall of one of the bedrooms of cassia’s house. he'd tried to run. he must have. she knows this because all of other bodies had been found together in the basement of cassia’s house. they must have gone there to hide. 

there was cali, slumped against the wall, where she must have crawled to die after they’d hit her and shot her, her short black hair matted and bruises blooming on her face. there was tiberius, holding onto agrippa’s hand. petra, blood dripping down her red-gold hair. arsinoe, with a broken nose and bruises on her neck, had to have gone down swinging. jasper, lying in front of iggy because even though enobaria is sure that he had to know it was the end and even though iggy was old enough that he could’ve been enobaria’s father jasper still had to try to protect one of his victors. iggy’s fingers had been wrapped around jasper’s lightly because that’s what your mentor is there for even when both your heads are on the chopping block. breccia’s body slumped over ryker’s. he must have been carrying her because she’d always had that leg that acted up ever since her games. there were the corpses of cercina and octavian, curled up together, blood matted in her blonde hair and blood on his hands. he must have been trying to save her, enobaria imagines. he would’ve followed her to the ends of the earth, and instead he had to watch her die. the two of them were one year apart, games-wise (they’d known each other pre-arena, enobaria suspects, even if neither of them says so because no one talks about before-the-academy, and no one talks about the academy because it on paper it doesn’t exist), and the moment she’d made it home he’d’ve been at her door with bunches of flowers if breccia hadn’t threatened to knock his head off if he didn’t leave her virgin victor alone. nero, sprawled in front of the door as though he’d been trying to hold it up, bullet wounds riddling his body and a boot print on his back.

sometimes, late at night, when she’s alone, enobaria wishes her body was among them. it’d have been easier, she imagines, to die with them. to die with the people who might as well have been her family. the capital would have found her with flint in her arms, next to agrippa. but when dawn breaks, she’s a good little victor from two and good little victors from two don’t think those things. 

the first time she’d seen the video she thought it had to be tracker jacker venom they’d given her, that she must be hallucinating, anything to mean it wasn’t true. she’d hoped desperately it was. but when their deaths came up again, and again, and again, always the same, she’d had to force herself to admit that it was real. the only one who wasn’t there was lyme, and they’d told her that lyme was a rebel and had been gunned down in a shootout with some peacekeepers in eight. they didn’t show her pictures, and enobaria doesn’t know whether to be sad or grateful. “i saw their bodies. they showed me pictures. every single person i loved got a bullet wound to the head. the only good thing about it is that i know it was over quick,” she murmurs, half to herself. johanna has a look of horror on her face. of course she does, enobaria realizes suddenly. they didn't have her fellow victors to torture her with. with evora dead before the quell, and blight during, johanna mason was the last lonely victor standing from district seven. “you know what?” enobaria says, after a beat of silence, standing up, knocking the chair over. “i’m sorry i came. i’ll let myself out.”

as she goes to leave, annie stops her in the hallway. she’s still holding the baby on one hip, and the still-open door lets in the wind, which tosses her skirts this way and that. she looks like a force of nature. “stay,” she says. enobaria blinks.

“what?” she says, confused.

“i’ll talk to jo,” annie says. “she’ll come around. besides, the baby likes you, and that’s good enough for me.”

and enobaria doesn’t know what to say other than, “okay.”

//

the second day she’s staying in annie and johanna’s house, they’re settling down to breakfast when she asks what the baby’s name is. judging by the way johanna rolls her eyes, this is a mistake, but enobaria doesn’t know how. 

annie sits down, tucking her feet under her. “he doesn’t have one.” she picks at the toast on her plate and tears off tiny bites before eating them.

“i keep telling her to just name him finnick already,” johanna moans, but judging by the fondness in the expression she’s giving the baby in her lap, she doesn’t mind it too much. 

annie ignores johanna and instead turns to enobaria. “i’m taking suggestions,” she says, in a tone that implies she’d like enobaria’s input. 

“um,” enobaria says, taking a bite of her eggs. “how about flint?” she says it before she thinks about it. she regrets it instantly. annie cocks her head to the side, and she looks deep in thought. she twirls one strand of hair around her finger as she thinks, and it glints in the morning sun coming through the windows.

johanna is spooning some applesauce into the baby’s mouth when annie says, “he looks like a flint.” enobaria looks at him. with tan skin, and blonde hair, he doesn’t look anything like her boy. he doesn't have the dark skin and dark hair that marks quarry workers. _maybe that’s a good thing_ , she thinks. _no baby should grow up with the legacy of smashing another child’s head in_. “i like it,” annie says. “flint cresta.”

johanna rolls her eyes. “are you sure about this, an?” annie nods, putting another piece of toast in her mouth. johanna spoons another bit of applesauce in the baby’s mouth as she says to enobaria, “don’t worry about it,” she advises. “she’ll just change her mind in a week anyway.”

//

the sunday after enobaria arrives, annie makes dinner. she’s an excellent cook, when she’s lucid enough to do so. they’re sitting down to eat when there’s a sharp rap on the door. johanna stands up, but annie pushes her chair back and gracefully unfolds from her seated position. “i’ll get it, jo,” she says, with a smile on her face, and if this was the first time enobaria had met her she’d wonder where the mad little annie cresta from four had gone.

when annie comes back, there’s a man with dark hair and chestnut skin following her with three girls that all have his dark hair. they’re all around eight or so, with the youngest looking five or six. 

“hello?” enobaria says, and at the glimpse of her teeth, the youngest recoils, and hides behind her father. 

“sorry,” annie says. “i forgot to warn you.” there’s something distant in her gaze, and flint fusses in her arms. after a long moment of silence, the man walks towards enobaria and holds out his hand for her to shake. she does. 

“gusset mercer. you can call me guss,” he says, with a warm smile. enobaria gives him a close-lipped smile back. the name sounds familiar, but enobaria can’t quite place it. upon seeing the look of confusion in her eyes, he adds, “cecilia’s husband. and these are our girls, chantilly, taffeta, and callico. we left district eight after, well, you know,” he says, with a glance back at his daughters. one of them is playing some kind of clapping game with johanna, and the others are hovering behind their father. “and annie invited us to live up here in four with her, and i’d never been out of eight before, so it seemed like a good a place as any.” enobaria nods. the name chantilly is rattling around her in her brain. it’s familiar, somehow. she decides not to ask him about it, and makes a mental note to do so later.

“nice to meet you,” she says, and then adds, “i’m sorry about cecilia.” she remembers casually telling cashmere that brutus had gone to kill cecilia and woof in the seventy-fifth games. something sharp and sad and ugly twists at her heart, and she consoles herself with the thought that at least brutus was a rule-follower, like his peacekeeper of a dad. she'd never talked to him much about emotions (because this was two, and victors didn't have those, but she suspected his father had been less than kind about rule-following). and besides, brutus was big into career honor and all that. he’d made it quick.

something deep and sorrowful twists guss’s expression. “not your fault,” he says, and then adds, with a rueful twist of his mouth, “can’t say if brutus was here i’d say the same, but well. it is what it is.”

enobaria is about to reply when johanna interrupts with a loud shout of protest. “are you gonna chat all day, or can we eat?” she asks, annoyance in her tone, and annie smiles indulgently. enobaria rolls her eyes. annie hands flint off to johanna, and she begins getting more dishes down when suddenly, something comes over her, and her eyes glaze over and the plates fall to the ground. there’s a loud crack of shattering porcelain, and flint starts to wail, and annie starts to scream. 

there’s a kind of polished, almost mechanical-seeming aspect to the motions that guss and johanna make. he takes the baby from johanna’s arms, and he takes the girls and flint outside, grabbing the youngest’s arm when she lingers and tries to stare. johanna grabs annie and begins whispering to her, in fierce, low tones, and enobaria wants to help, but all she can think about is the way the screams of the district ten girl she killed reverberated around the arena.

//

annie stops screaming, eventually, and johanna helps her into the shower so she can clean the blood off of her feet, and then tucks her into bed. johanna cleans up the broken glass without a word, and enobaria takes flint back from guss and apologizes. 

“don’t be sorry,” he says, as he’s leaving, the eldest of his girls dancing ahead of him down the street. “there’s always next sunday.”

enobaria spoons applesauce and bits of cracker into flint’s mouth and johanna sits at the table and neither of them says anything for a long time. enobaria doesn't know what to say, even if she wanted to.

johanna’s eyes are dark as she looks over to enobaria. “go ahead,” she says. “ask.”

“ask what?” enobaria says. 

“ask about annie. i know you want to,” johanna says, tone dark. 

“i know about annie,” enobaria says. what she does not say is, _she's the mad little victor from district four. everyone knows that_.

“don't you want to ask why she’s like that?” johanna asks. she’s got some kind of concentrated expression on her face. enobaria has the distinct feeling this is some kind of test, and she doesn’t understand how.

enobaria feeds flint some crackers. “no,” she says. “i know what the arena does to you.” she tries to hide the judgement in her tone. joanna’s over here acting like enobaria’s stupid, and she isn’t. sure, enobaria might’ve been a career, but she went through the arena the same as the rest of them. hell, her games were one of the longest, so if anyone here knows what the arena does do to you, it’s damn well going to be her. she saw her boy go through it, too, something johanna never did — enobaria has seen what the arena does from both sides, both as a mentor to a victor and as a victor herself. 

johanna looks like she wants to laugh, but doesn't. “annie was like this before, too,” she says. “wasn't just after the games.”

“oh,” enobaria says. “okay.” she continues to rip up a roll and feed it to flint. johanna’s eyes burn.

“okay?” she hisses. “that’s all you have to say?”

enobaria shrugs. “what more is there to say?” 

johanna is speaking in a controlled whisper now, something that’s almost scarier than what she was doing before. “it means you have to be careful around her. she’s delicate, enobaria, and - ” johanna is cut off when the same sound of porcelain shattering as earlier in the evening comes from behind enobaria. enobaria turns around. annie is standing there, fire in her eyes the same shade as her hair. and her feet surrounded by the shattering of a teacup. shit, enobaria wonders, half-bemused, how much do they spend on dishes a year?

“i am not fragile,” she says. “i didn’t through hell and back for you to stand here and tell enobaria to walk on eggshells around me, jo.” the way she says johanna’s name is harsh and hard, and it no longer sounds like a nickname and sounds more like the way an old friend says your name after you’ve not seen each other for twenty-years. “sure, i was broken before the arena, and sure, it damn well broke me more, because you don’t watch twenty-three other children die around you and come out whole, but i am not fragile. i am perfectly fucking capable of handling myself, johanna mason, and if you don’t know that, you should leave.”

johanna’s face turns pale as a ghost. “annie, i - ”

annie’s voice is firm. “leave,” she says firmly, and johanna stands up.

“annie, please,” johanna says, begging. enobaria doesn’t know what to do.

“she was just trying to - ” enobaria says, because she feels like she should at least do something, but annie cuts her off with a firm look.

“tell you to be careful? because you're a career?” annie asks, but there's something harsh and mocking in her tone. “jo likes to forget i was, too. i was in the pack. i killed kids in the bloodbath. the only thing you did worse than me was you ripped out a boy’s throat instead of drowning him,” she pauses, thoughtful, before adding, “and if i was in your situation, i damn well would’ve ripped his throat out too. if i’d spent eight weeks in a fucking frozen arena to find out my final opponent had known where i was and had been avoiding me the whole time?” she shrugs. “who knows what i would’ve done? in the end, we both killed kids. why does it matter how they died in the end?” annie says, a calm look of contemplation over her face, like the calm after a storm. she walks over to enobaria and picks flint up, turning to leave as she does so. before she goes, annie looks back at johanna, whose face is sheet-white, and says, “and if you ever tell someone to treat me delicately again, i won’t hesitate to send you back to district seven where you came from,” she hisses, and then turns on her heel and walks from the room.

//

enobaria sometimes sits and stares out the window for days on end when she thinks about what happened to the other district two victors. it’s during one of these episodes that johanna walks into her room without knocking, carrying a bundle of brushes and jars. “what’re these for?” enobaria asks, annoyed.

“they’re paints,” johanna says, sounding surprisingly cheerful. she dumps all of this onto enobaria’s desk with a slight clatter.

“i know that,” enobaria says. “what’re you giving them to me for?

johanna brings in some white canvases from the hallway, and places them next to enobaria before taking a seat on her bed. “my therapist back in thirteen gave them to me. he wanted me to ‘paint my trauma’ or some bullshit,” she pauses for a moment, and then laughs. “he stopped making me do that when i gave him a third fully black canvas.” enobaria looks at johanna suspiciously, and johanna adds, “they didn’t work for me. but since painting was your talent, i think they might for you. paint pictures of your mentor or whatever bullshit helps you cope.”

enobaria glares at her. “how’s that supposed to help?” she snaps, annoyed. johanna’s right; painting was her talent, but she hasn’t done it since before the quarter quell.

johanna stands up, and offers her a grin. “you can’t stare out the window forever,” she says. “and doing something is better than doing nothing.”

“no it’s not!” enobaria shouts at johanna, as she retreats, with a cackle and a closed door.

//

in the end, it turns out johanna’s right. 

enobaria picks up the paintbrushes, and the first thing she paints is flint’s arena. she’d practically memorized it; she’d seen it so much during the month he was in the games. the crumbling buildings, the mutt eyes peeking out from the sewers and the windows, bricks scattered about like the brick he used to smash the district ten tribute’s head in. when she steps back and looks at it, it doesn’t look quite finished, so she adds his sword with a strip of his red district two jacket tied to it in the center. her eyes well with tears inexplicably. maybe, if brutus hadn’t volunteered to take his place, maybe, maybe — she shakes her head and scrubs the tears from her eyes. maybe doesn’t matter now.

she hides the painting in the back of her closet and doesn’t look at it for another month. 

//

she paints all of their arenas. 

brutus’s foggy, temperate forest, with rivers winding their way through the patches of trees, and the porcupine mutts that shot spines into tributes with deadly accuracy. brutus’s sword is propped up in the crook of a tree and his jacket tied around one of the branches.

tiberius's flat-topped mountains, filled with lush green vegetation and fields of red flowers that poisoned three tributes who even got near it. she leaves tiberius's knives on top of one of the mountains and paints a blooming flower growing up from underneath them.

ryker’s hot springs underneath a mountain that would end up collapsing, since one of the tributes got a taste for flesh after seven tributes boiled alive in the hot springs and he couldn’t find anything else to eat and children killing other children was fine, but cannibalism was where the line was drawn. enobaria puts ryker’s mace on the edge of one of the hot springs, with the orange ring of rock encircling the spring and shooting out like veins into the surrounding grey rock.

lyme’s winding valley with rocky columns sprouting up out of the earth like teeth in a giant’s mouth, with salamander mutts the size of her arm that oozed acid out of their skin. lyme’s sword is stuck in the dirt in front of one of the tiny caves that all the tributes started in, her arena jacket tied around the hilt.

agrippa’s lava rock arena, with her arena jacket draped over a lava rock that was still stained red from the blood of the people she’d killed with it. enobaria adds an empty whiskey bottle lying on its side in front that the light glints on, and tries not to think about the first time she met her mentor.

cercina’s arena, with nothing but a large field of what looked to be dried waist-high grass. upon closer inspection, it had turned out to be a bog that swallowed ten tributes before cercina claimed her crown. cercina’s bloody victor’s crown sits, with her stone ring token on top of one of the spikes, half-sinking into the bog, in front of the shiny gold cornucopia.

nero’s idyllic beach shoreline, with razor-sharp barnacles on the rocks and water that would suddenly deepen, drowning five tributes. his sword half-buried in the sand.

petra’s arena of dusty brown cliffs that collapsed with no warning, dropping five tributes to their deaths. her machete is stabbed into the dirt and a lock of red hair tied around it in front of the river where the careers had spent much of their time camped until the river had flooded back and washed two of them away to their deaths. in the distance, there’s a rust-red jacket draped on one of the cliffs where petra had shoved her final opponent to their death after losing her machete to the waters.

octavian’s giant cavern with a lake in the center that dropped to freezing at night, with rockfalls that could occur at any moment and carnivorous eyeless fish mutts in the lake that made swimming impossible, and the cornucopia on a small island in the center of the lake, with thin rock paths that allowed the tributes to get access to the supplies within. his pickaxe lies by the lakeshore, puddled on his arena jacket, and his token, a stone ring, in front of it.

iggy’s waterless, stony riverbed, where the only water came from the cornucopia. iggy’s crossbow lies on top of his red arena jacket. enobaria adds two crossed bolts in front of his crossbow to remember him by. 

arsinoe’s arena of flat grey rocks, with only caves and tunnels for shelter that could collapse at any moment. her mace sits in the center of the painting in front of the coal-black cornucopia with a piece of her arena jacket tied to it.

caligula’s rainforest, with her knives resting on the forest floor, almost sinking into the moist dirt. enobaria thinks that it looks almost like cali’s forgotten them. like she’s going to come back for them.

jasper’s arena with a towering waterfall in the center that would kill four tributes by sweeping them away and smashing their heads against the rocks at the bottom. his dual knives rest by the riverbed on a mossy stone.

breccia’s black sand beach, with only stark black cliffs standing like sentries for shelter against the monkey and turtle mutts, and water only if you dug deep into the sand to find it where it was buried. her machete rests on the shore, only a few inches away from the water that might drag it into the ocean to be buried among the waves.

she hides the paintings in the back of her closet so she doesn’t have to look at them. someday, she imagines, it won’t hurt so much, and she’ll put them up and smile fondly at a memory of brutus sympathizing with her hatred of snow or of lyme beating up brutus, or brutus beating up lyme, or petra just tossing anything into the pot and calling it cooking while brutus watched in horror, instead of tearing up and picturing their dead bodies. but she doesn’t know when that day will be. she hopes its sooner rather than later. 

//

after a few sunday dinners, enobaria finally gets up the courage to ask guss about cecelia. 

“what was she like?” she asks, tone soft. the girls are running around the living room, playing a game with johanna, and annie is upstairs with flint, napping, leaving only enobaria and guss at the table. 

guss knows immediately who she’s talking about. “cece was beautiful,” he says, and enobaria’s eyes well with tears. the last person she knew called cece had ended up with a bullet hole to her brain. she blinks her tears away and listens as guss goes on. “sweet. funny.” he pauses for a moment and then adds, “when i looked at her, it was easy to forget she was the girl who ripped out someone’s spine once upon a time.”

it all comes flooding back to enobaria then. she doesn’t know how she forgot. the sixtieth games, two years before her own. chantilly fellona. gloss and cashmere’s older sister. once the pack had split, the district two tributes had stuck together and chantilly had taken them on her own, meaning she’d been in rough shape when she went hunting for cecelia, who the pack had assumed was off dying of her bloodbath leg wound. in reality, cecelia had stitched it up, and spent the rest of the games hiding and living off stolen food and water from other tributes. and then she’d used a sickle and her knowledge of sewing and ripped out chantilly’s spine. enobaria remembers staring at the camera shot of chantilly’s bloody spine cupped in the sickle as though it was embracing it it on the academy television. she remembers the sight of it had made some of the girls in her year sick. she remembers they’d had to run laps for that. she remembers thinking that she couldn’t believe that someone who hadn’t killed anyone else in the games could kill someone so brutally.

“is that why...” enobaria trails off. she doesn’t know how to phrase it. how do you ask someone if their first child is named after someone they’d killed? she can’t imagine it’s a question that comes up particularly often. 

guss nods. “yeah,” he says with a smile. “she always felt bad about it, after. she said that when chantilly cried out, it was the worst thing she’d ever heard. she said that she wasn’t right, those last few days in the arena.”

enobaria nods. “arena madness,” she says. “that’s what the academy calls it. when you’ve been in the arena too long. i had it too,” she says, flashing her teeth a bit. guss nods at her, looking almost understanding. well. as understanding as someone who has never been in the arena can.

he frowns, looking at the wooden table, fiddling with his now-empty mug. “i miss her. but i’m almost glad she died, in a way. because her death fueled the war, and now our girls won’t ever go into the games.” there’s another long pause. “i know beetee still visits his kids’ graves,” he sighs. “i can’t imagine what it’d be like to lose them.” he laughs a little. “obviously, i wish she was here, but...” he trails off. 

enobaria bites her lip, and she can taste a little bit of blood well up. “beetee had kids?” she asks. she’d never known. in all the months they’d spent together in district thirteen, he’d never mentioned them. 

guss tilts his head at her, like a confused dog. “yeah,” he says slowly. “him and wiress. twins. they both died in the games.”

enobaria blinks. “oh,” she murmurs. “i didn’t know.”

“no reason you should,” guss says cordially. “they didn’t talk about them much. especially after they died. the two of them always kept to themselves, anyway, and you won after they both died, so they wouldn’t have been much on your radar.”

there’s a long lull in the conversation before guss says softly, “our wedding was the happiest day of my life.” he pauses again, then smiles sadly, adding, “well, until our girls were born.”

“what was it like?” enobaria asks.

“she had the most beautiful dress,” he says. “it was all sorts of colors, and patterns, and if it was on anyone else i’d think it was the ugliest thing i’d ever seen, but on her...” he pauses. “it was gorgeous. she was a patchwork bride, but somehow...she was so beautiful. she’d spent her entire life collecting that fabric,” he laughs a little, the memory making his brown eyes warm, “i think she even somehow got her stylist to give her some of the fabric from her arena outfit. and she was a victor then, and she could’ve had any dress she wanted, but she still wanted the tradition.”

“is that tradition in district eight?” enobaria asks, and guss nods. “in district two,” enobaria says, “you both swear on a stone, and then one of the stonesmiths carves the stone into two rings, and you each wear one on a necklace,” she pauses, before adding, “it’s said if your rings breaks, your marriage will too.”

guss looks at her for a long moment. “huh,” he says, and then, after a long pause, asks, “did you ever find someone to swear on stone to?”

“no,” enobaria says, a little too quickly, before she can think about whether it’s true or not. “no. i don't think so.” she does not mention that she thinks about kissing johanna and annie. she does not mention that she dreams about kissing them until none of them can breathe.

//

annie comes in that night while enobaria is painting. she hugs enobaria from behind and enobaria jumps. she can feel annie’s hair brush against her cheek. 

“relax,” annie says. “it’s just me.” enobaria relaxes into annie’s touch. “what are you painting?”

“your arena,” enobaria says. she hadn’t realized that she was painting it until she says it. she looks at the lush green trees and the stark stone cliff in the background. 

annie reaches for enobaria’s hands and pulls her up from where she’s sitting, and the two of them are just listening to the distant sound of the beach in silence before enobaria leans in and kisses her, tangling her hands in annie’s long hair. annie’s lips taste like sea salt, and enobaria presses her bodies into annie’s and annie wraps her hands around enobaria’s waist. 

annie pulls away suddenly, her hand hovering in front of her face. “i’m - ” enobaria bites her lip and can taste the blood. 

“i’m sorry,” she says. “i didn’t - ” she doesn’t say that she’s seen johanna and annie’s soft kisses when they think she’s not looking. enobaria moves past annie. she has to get out of here. the room feels too small suddenly. 

“it’s okay,” annie says, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. she reaches out and catches enobaria’s wrist, and pulls her close. they stay there for a moment, and enobaria can feel annie’s breath against her own, and then annie cups enobaria’s cheek in her hand and leans down and kisses her again. 

enobaria is breathless. 

//

that night, after flint goes to bed, annie sits them down with cups of tea at the table.

“what the hell is this about, anyway?” johanna gripes, but annie silences her with a look.

“look, i’m sorry,” enobaria says. “i’ll go if you want me to. i didn’t mean to get in the middle of whatever you have going on here, and i...i can go.”

there’s a hard set to annie’s mouth as she says, “no.”

“wait, what are you talking about?” johanna says. 

“i kissed annie,” enobaria says. “and i know you two are...well. in a relationship, and...”

johanna cuts her off. “is that what this is about?” she says, and bursts out into laughter.

enobaria frowns at her, and annie reaches across the table and takes her hand. “‘baria,” annie says, and enobaria’s first thought is that the last person to call her that was agrippa, and agrippa’s dead, and annie sees her face pale. “eno,” she amends. “we’ve both been in love with you since you moved in. that’s why i had you stay. i knew jo had feelings for you, and i, well...” she shrugs. “i figured mine would come along. or they wouldn’t.”

“you...what?” enobaria says. she didn’t think that either of them wanted her, let alone _both of them_.

“you can’t let annie have all the fun,” johanna says, trying to frown in mock-anger but smiling too much to keep up the facade. “so get over here and kiss me, mcclave.”

so enobaria does. 

//

what enobaria learns, after that, is there’s something comforting about falling asleep in between two people who love her. sure, jo snores louder than anyone else enobaria’s ever met, brutus included, and annie’s hair always ends up in everyone else’s space (enobaria’s woken up with annie’s hair in her mouth more than once) and enobaria always wakes up sweaty because the sun shines in through their window and annie refuses to put up curtains, but there’s something worth it about waking up warm and knowing that if she has nightmares there are two people who will hold her while she goes back to sleep.


End file.
